






























W 


A -> 




; * > • : ° o : 

O ^ V ^ =r , > «>* 

K »> r °<i^ * a n 0 \ \? o y * o ^ * 

* ^/> av ^ i}3C/'\ r ° 

</> \v » ?A tew/. % z 



■iK *' 

c \ % $ tt 

° A^ V O 

V> W . ffiiw ^ ^ «^. V> 

o > ^ . ^KUr^ % c ^ t> 

iv ^ ^ j V A O / 




y \\ 
v* ; 

/ 

< ) O y <r oi 

A 0 s 4 * r °~t> * 3 H 0 ' \^ 

*- %#* 



* A ^ * y <T**V A • 

,n **[rr/2*>+ - °4§*k"« ^ 

v s ° ^ G’ \° °a 




/, s " '*% » a H 0 ’ 0 ^ e 

• A <* -f* . „ r f? 5 ) ♦ 


’/■ > 

* 

r* 
o 

J- A -v ^ 

/ c »"«, (A c 

. et i 0 v ./ »*4fe> A A A 

Sr * 







■>* v 

o o' 


A A 




l\ 

-r ^ 


SsT, rf- "z 


, „ * 1 1 ' ”' A s ». , 'A ^ 4 = N o’ A A'* 

'• ^ j .0 A C' V »'*<>, ■> 

Arf^/A «. A * *$&$( . V ,v - - * • 

- <= •%.«,* - ^ * j 



A ^ 


' v vjst'j*' * A \ 

V**’'A\* l,, « %'°* x ‘‘ 

VSi ,A , V si/Ts-t -1 , 0 



V <^\ 







$ r 0 N 0 \ 

c * v 
* # * 



V * 0, ^ * • ' '" A s s » • A 4 3 * 0 ' A 




, x° °< 

* 'l^LL ° N ° ’ A\ ^ •.,V*' 1 ' * '-*°° 


o <\V <P, 



* <V oV ^ • 


o^ s 

r c • * 4 

O ^ <A o 

° ^ ^ ° 

y***' -v A cx * 

S s A o, ^ 

* A v*\A% °o 




> ^0 X 

1 A s - • " r* '\ " 5 * 0 ' v *\ '">/*'>*•"'' 


= ^e. .A *'<?! 



*<> ^ ^ Ci * 

^-A : 


</> <^\ 


cS <*- 

,v ^ 



" «c, ^ % VSfeii' V ,v 

O ^ A o i=l Ife^ r- </> A V 



* _c^Cw A *> .A c,° ■ 













\ 


THE LAST DAT 


LORD’S PASSION. 














THE LAST DAT 


OUR LORD’S PASSION. 


BY THE 

KEY. WILLIAM HANNA, LL.JD. 

AUTHOR OF THE LIFE OF HR. CHALMERS. 


NEW YOKE: 

ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS, 

630 BROADWAY. 


1 8 6 4 . 


E>T4-"50 

M33 


By 

APR 18 1929 


*nd Navy 

Washington D. 


o 


STEREOTYPED BY 
MITH & MODOUGAI 
82 & 84 Beekman-st. 


PRINTED BY 

E. O. Jenkins, 
20 N. William-st, 


PREFACE. 


This volume contains a narrative of all the 
incidents in the last day of our Lord's suffer- 
ing life ; following him from the anest in the 
garden to the burial in Joseph's sepulchre. It 
is made up of lectures written in the course of 
ordinary preparation for the pulpit. By means 
of the best critical helps, the writer was, in 
the first instance, at pains to read aright and 
harmonize the accounts given by the different 
Evangelists. Out of them he has endeavored to 
construct a continuous and expanded narrative, 
intended to bring out, as vividly as possible, 
not only the sequence of the incidents, but the 
characters, motives, and feelings of the different 
actors and spectators in the events described. 
He has refrained from all critical or doctrinal 
discussions as alien from the object he had in 


Y1 


PREFACE. 


view ; nor has he thought it necessary to bur- 
den the following pages with references to all 
the authorities consulted. The English reader 
will find in the writings of Alford, Stier, or 
Ellicott, the warrant for most of those readings 
of the original and inspired records upon which 
the following narrative is based. 

Edinburgh, May 3, 1862. 


CONTENTS. 

% 

PAGB 

The Betrayal and the Betrayer, 9 

The Denials, Repentance, and Restoration of S-t. 

Peter, 36 

The Trial before the Sanhedrim, 63 

Christ’s First Appearance before Pilate 90 

Christ’s Appearance before Herod, 114 

Christ’s Second Appearance before Pilate 139 

The Daughters of Jerusalem Weeping, 169 

The Penitent Thief, 195 

The Mother of our Lord, 228 

The Darkness and the Desertion, 254 

“It is Finished,” 215 

The Attendant Miracles, 291 

The Physical Cause of the Death of Christ, 323 

The Burial, 351 

Appendix, 369 



































r 





► 


























































. ' 












































































. 














I. 


m& \\u Qtbmi&tt ♦* 

“ The night on which he was betrayed” 
— that long, sleepless, checkered, troubled 
night — the last night -of our Lord’s suffering 
life — that one and only night in which we 
can follow him throughout, and trace his 
footsteps from hour to hour, — through what 
strange vicissitudes of scene and incident, 
of thought and feeling, did our Saviour on 
that night pass ! The meeting in the upper 
chamber, the washing of the disciples’ feet, 
the keeping of the Hebrew passover ; the 
cloud that gathered round his brow, the sad 
warnings to Peter, and the terrible ones to 
Judas ; the institution of his own Supper, 

* Matthew xxvi. 47-56; Mark xiv 43-50; Luke xxii. 47-53; 
John xviii. 2-11. 


1 * 


i 


10 THE BETRAYAL AND 

the tender consolatory discourse, the sub- 
lime intercessory prayer; the Garden; its 
brief and broken prayers, its deep and aw- 
ful agony ; the approach of the High Priest’s 
band, the arrest, the desertion by all, the 
denials by one ; the private examination 
before Annas, the public arraignment before 
the Sanhedrim; the silence as to all minor 
charges, the great confession, the final and 
formal condemnation to death ; — all these 
between the time that the sun of that Thurs- 
day evening set, and the sun of Friday 
morning rose upon Jerusalem. We are all, 
perhaps, more familiar with the incidents of 
the first half of that night, than with those 
of the second. Of its manifold sorrows, the 
agony in the Garden formed the fitting 
climax. Both outwardly and inwardly, it 
was to the great Sufferer its hour of darkest, 
deepest midnight. Let us join him now as 
he rises from his last struggle in Gethsemane, 
and follow till we see him laid in Joseph’s 
sepulchre. 

The sore amazement is past. Some voice 


THE BETRAYER. 


11 

/> 

has said to the troubled waters of his spirit, 
Peace, be still ! Instead of the stir and 
tumult of the soul, there is a calm and digni- 
fied composure, which never once forsakes 
him, till the same strange internal agony once 
more comes upon him on the cross. “ Rise,” 
says Jesus, as for the third and last time he 
bends over the slumbering disciples in the 
Garden, “ Rise, let us be going. Lo, he that 
betrayeth is at hand !” Wakeful as he has 
been whilst the others were sleeping, has he 
heard the noise of approaching footsteps ? 
has he seen the shadows of advancing forms, 
the flickering light of torch and lantern glim- 
mering through the olive leaves? It was 
not necessary that eye or ear^ should give him 
notice of the approach. He knew all that 
the betrayer meditated when, a few hours 
before, he had said to him, “ That thou doest, 
do quickly.” He had seen and known, as 
though he had been present, the immediate 
resort of Judas to those with whom he had 
so recently made his unhallowed bargain, 
telling them that the hour had come for car- 


12 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


Tying the projected arrangement into execu- 
tion, and that he was quite sure that Jesus, 
as his custom all that week had been, would 
g.o out to Gethsemane so soon as the meeting 
in the upper chamber had broken up, and 
that there they could easily and surely, with- 
, out any fear of popular disturbance, lay hold 
of him. The proposal was hailed and adopt- 
ed with eager haste, for there was no time to 
be lost, — they had but a single day for action 
left. The band for seizing him was instantly 
assembled — ■“ a great multitude,” quite need- 
lessly numerous, even though resistance had 
been contemplated by the eleven; a band 
curiously composed, — some Roman soldiers 
in it from the garrison of Fort Antonia, ex- 
cited on being summoned to take part in a 
midnight enterprise of some difficulty and 
danger; the. captain of the Temple guard, 
accompanied by some subordinates, private 
servants of Annas and Caiaphas, the High 
Priests, with some members even of the San- 
hedrim among them ;* a band curiously ao 


$ See Luke xxii. 52. 


THE BETRAYER. 


13 


coutred, — with staves as well as swords, with 
lanterns and torches, that, clear though the 
, night was — the moon being at the full,* they 
might hunt their victim out through all the 
shady retreats of the olive gardens, and pre- 
vent the possibility of escape. Stealthily 
they cross the Kedron, with Judas at their 
head, and come to the very place where all 
this while Jesus has been enduring his great 
agony. Yes ; this is the place where Judas 
tells them they will be so sure to find him. 
Now, then, is the time for the lanterns and 
the torches. They are saved the search. 
Stepping out suddenly into the clear moon- 
light, Jesus himself stands before them, and 
calmly says, “ Whom seek ye ?” There are 
many in that band who know him well 
enough, but there is not one of them who has 
courage to answer — “ Thee.” A creeping 
awe is already on their spirits. They leave 
it to others, to those who know him but by 
name, to say, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus 

* We know it was so from the day of the month on which the 
Passover was celebrated. 


14 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


says to them, I am he ; and as soon as he 
has said it, they go backward, and fall every 
one to the ground. Has some strange sight 
met their eye, has Jesus been momentarily 
transfigured as on the Mount, have some 
stray beams from the concealed glory burst 
forth upon them, or is it some inward terror 
shot by a hand invisible through their 
hearts ? Whatever the spell be that has 
stripped them of all strength, and driven 
them backwards to the ground, it lasts but 
for a brief season. He who suddenly laid it 
on as quickly lifts it off. But for that short 
time, what a picture does the scene present ! 
Jesus standing in the quiet moonlight, calmly 
waiting till the postrate men shall rise again ; 
or turning, perhaps, a pensive look upon his 
disciples cowering under the shade of the 
olive-trees, and gazing with wonder at the 
sight of that whole band lying flat upon the 
ground. For a moment or two, how still it 
is ! you could have heard the falling of an 
olive-leaf. But now the spell is over, and 
they rise. The Boman soldier starts to his 


THE BETRAYER. 


15 


feet again, as more than half ashamed, not 
knowing what should have so frightened him. 
The Jewish officer gathers up his scattered 
strength, wondering that it had not gone for 
ever. Again the quiet question comes from 
the lips of Jesus, Whom seek ye? They 
say to him, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus an- 
swers, “ I have told you that I am he. If 
therefore ye seek me, let these go their way : 
that the saying might he fulfilled which he 
spake, Of them which thou hast given me I 
have lost none.” 

Perfectly spontaneous, then, on the part 
of our Divine Redeemer, was the delivering 
of himself up into the hands of his enemies. 
He who by a word and look sent that rough 
hireling band reeling backwards to the ground, 
how easily could he have kept it there ; or 
how easily, though they had been standing 
all around him, could he have passed out 
through the midst of them, every eye so 
blinded that it could not see him, every arm 
so paralyzed that it could not touch him? 
Judas knew how in such a manner he had 


16 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


previously escaped. He .must have had a 
strong impression that it would not he so 
easy a thing to accomplish the arrest, when 
he told the men, “ Whomsoever I shall kiss, 
that same is he ; take him, and hold him fast.” 
Take him ; hold him ! it will only he if he 
please to he taken and to he held that they 
will have any power to do it. This perfect 
freedom from all outward compulsion, this 
entirely voluntary surrender of himself to suf- 
fering and death, enter as necessary elements 
into the great Atonement. And is not its es- 
sential element — its being made for others — 
shadowed forth in this outward incident of 
the Redeemer’s life ? “ Take me,” he said, 

“ hut let these go their way.” It was to 
throw a protecting shield over this little flock, 
that he put forth his great power over that 
mixed multitude before him, and made them 
feel how wholly they were within his grasp. 
It was to acquire for the time such a mastery 
over them that they should consent to let his 
disciples go. It was no part of th§ir purpose 
beforehand to have done so. They proved 


THE BETRAYER. 


17 


this, when, the temporary impression over, 
they seized the young man by the way, whom 
curiosity had drawn out of the city, whom 
they took to be one of his disciples, and who 
with difficulty escaped out of their hands. 

“ Take me, hut let these go their way.” 
John saw, in the freedom and safety of the 
disciples thus secured, a fulfilment of the 
Lord’s own saying in the prayer of the Sup- 
per-chamber, “ Them that thou gayest me I 
have kept, and none of them is lost.” We 
can not imagine that the beloved disciple saw 
nothing beyond protection from common 
earthly danger in the expression which he 
quotes ; hut that he saw, in the very manner 
in which that kind of protection had been 
extended, a type or emblem of the higher 
and spiritual deliverance that Christ has ac- 
complished for his people by his deliverance 
unto death. Freedom for us, by his suffering 
himself to be bound ; safety for us, by the 
sacrifice of himself ; life for us, by the death 
which he endured : have we not much of the 
very soul and spirit of the atonement in those 


18 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


few words, “ Take me, but let these go their 
way ?” It is the spiritual David, the great 
good Shepherd, saying, “ Let thine hand be 
laid upon me ; but as for these sheep, not, 
0 Lord my God, on them.” 

Judas stood with those to whom Jesus said, 
Whom seek ye ? Along with them he reeled 
back and fell to the ground. Along with 
them he speedily regained his standing pos- 
ture, and was a listener as the Lord said, I 
have told you that I am he ; inviting them to 
do with him as they wished. There is a 
pause, a hesitation ; for who will be the first 
to lay hand upon him ? Judas will relieve 
them of any lingering fear. He will show 
them how safe it is to approach this Jesus. 
Though the stepping forth of Christ, and the 
questions and answers which followed, have 
done away with all need of the preconcerted 
signal, he will yet go through all that he had 
engaged to do ; or, perhaps, it is almost a 
mechanical impulse upon which he acts, for 
he had fixed on the thing that he was to do 
toward accomplishing the arrest ; he had 


THE BETRAYER. 


19 


conned his part well beforehand, and braced 
himself up to go through with it. Hence, 
when the time for action comes, he stops not 
to reflect, but lets the momentum of his pre- 
determined purpose carry him along. He 
salutes Jesus with a kiss. If ever a righteous 
indignation might legitimately be felt, surely 
it was here. And if that burning sense of 
wrong had gone no further in its expression 
than simply the refusal of such a salutation, 
would not Christ have acted with unimpeach- 
able propriety ? But it is far above this level 
that Jesus will now rise. He will give an 
example of gentleness, of forbearance, of long- 
suffering kindness without a parallel. Jesus 
accepts the betrayer’s salutation. He does 
more. He says a word or two to this de- 
luded man ; — “ Friend, wherefore art thou 
come ?” Is it possible that thou canst im- 
agine, after all that passed between us at the 
supper-table, that I am ignorant of thy pur- 
pose in this visit ? I know that purpose well ; 
thou knowest that I do ; if not, I will make 
a last attempt to make thee know and feel it 


20 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


now. Thought of, cared for, warned in so 
many ways, art thou really come to betray 
such a Master as I have ever been to thee ? 
But though thou hast made up thy mind to 
such a deed, how is it that thou choosest such 
a cloak as this beneath which to conceal thy 
purpose ? The deed is bad enough itself 
without crowning it with the lie of the hypo- 
crite, — “ Judas, betrayest thou the Son of 
man with a kiss ?”— *the last complaint of 
wounded love, the last of the many and most 
touching appeals made to the conscience and 
heart of the betrayer ; rebuke and remon- 
strance in the words, but surely their tone is 
one more of pity than of anger ; surely the 
wish of the speaker was to arrest the traitor, 
if it were not yet too late. Had Judas 
yielded even at that last moment ; with a 
broken and a contrite heart had he thrown 
himself at his Master’s feet, to bathe with 
tears the feet of him whose cheek he had just 
polluted with his unhallowed kiss ; looking 
up through those tears of penitence, had he 
sought mercy of the Lord, how freely would 


THE BETRAYER. 


21 


that mercy have been extended to him ! who 
can doubt that he would have been at once 
forgiven ? But he did not, he would not 
yield ; and so on he went, till there was no- 
thing left to him hut the horror of that re- 
morse which dug for him the grave of the 
suicide. 

We often wonder, as we read his story, 
how it was ever possible, that, in the face of 
so many, such explicit, solemn, affectionate 
appeals, this man should have so obstinately 
pursued his course. We should wonder, per- 
haps, the less, if we only reflected what a 
blinding, hardening power any one fixed idea, 
any one settled purpose, any one dominant 
passion, in the full flush and fervor of its as- 
cendency, exerts upon the human spirit ; how 
it blinds to consequences that are then staring 
us in the very face ; how it deadens to re- 
monstrances to which, in other circumstances, 
we should at once have yielded ; how it car- 
ries us over obstacles that at other times 
would at once have stopped us ; nay, more, 
and what perhaps is the most striking feature 


22 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


of the whole, how the very interferences, for 
which otherwise we should have been grate- 
ful, are resented ; how the very appeals in- 
tended and fitted to arrest, become as so many 
goads driving us Dn the more determinedly 
upon our path. So it was with Judas. And 
let us not think that we have in him a mon- 
strous specimen of almost superhuman wick- 
edness. We should be nearer the truth, I 
suspect, if we took him as an average speci- 
men of what the passion of avarice, or any 
like passion, when once it has got the mas- 
tery, may lead any man to be and do. For 
we have no reason to believe of Judas, that 
from the first he was an utter reprobate. Our 
Lord we scarcely can believe would have ad- 
mitted such a man to the number of the 
twelve. Can it be believed of him that when 
he first joined himself to Jesus, it was to 
make gain of that connexion ? There was 
but little prospect of worldly gain in following 
the Nazarene. Nor can we fairly attribute 
that obstinacy which J udas showed in the last 
great crisis of his life, to utter deadness of 


THE BETRAYER. 


23 


conscience, utter hardness of heart. The 
man who no sooner heard the death-sentence 
given against his Master, than — without even 
waiting to see if it would be executed — he 
rushed before the men by whom that sentence 
had been pronounced — the very men with 
whom he had made his unholy covenant, from 
whom he had got but an hour or two before 
the price of blood — exclaiming in the bitter- 
ness of his heart, “ I have sinned, in that I 
have betrayed innocent blood — the man 
who took those thirty pieces of silver, which 
his itching palm had so longed to clutch, but 
which now were burning like scorching lead 
the hand that grasped them, and flung them 
ringing on the temple floor, and hurried to a 
lonely field without the city walls and hanged 
himself, dying in all likelihood before his 
Master — let us not think of him that he was 
utterly heartless — that he had a conscience 
seared as with a hot iron. 

What, then, is the true explanation of his 
character and career ? Let us assume that, 
when he first united himself to Christ, it was 


24 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


not of deliberate design to turn that connex- 
ion into a source of profit. He found, how- 
ever, as time run on, that to some small ex- 
tent it could be so employed. The little 
company that he had joined had chosen him 
to be their treasurer, to hold and to dispense 
the slender funds which they possessed. 
Those who are fond of money, as he was, are 
generally careful in the keeping, thrifty in 
their use of it. Judas had those faculties in 
perfection, and they won for him that office 
of trust, to him so terribly dangerous. The 
temptation was greater than he could resist. 
He became a pilferer from that small bag. 
Little as it had to feed upon, his passion 
grew. It grew, for he had no higher prin- 
ciple, no better feeling, to subdue it. It 
grew, till he began to picture to himself what 
untold wealth was in store for him when his 
Master should throw off that reserve and dis- 
guise which he had so long and so studiously 
preserved, and take to himself his power, and 
set up his kingdom — a kingdom which he, in 
common with all the apostles, believed was 


THE BETRAYER. 


25 


to be a visible and temporal one. It grew, 
till delay became intolerable. At the supper 
in Bethany, it vexed him to see that box of 
ointment of spikenard which might have been 
sold for three hundred pence, wasted on what 
seemed to him an idle piece of premature and 
romantic homage. It vexed him still more 
to hear his Master rebuke the irritation he 
had displayed, and speak now once again, as 
he had been doing so often lately, of his 
death and burial, as if the splendid vision of 
his kingdom were never to be realized. 
Could nothing be done to force his Master on 
to exercise his kingly power ? These Scribes 
and Pharisees, who hated him so bitterly, 
desired nothing so much as to get him into 
their hands. If once they did so, would he 
not, in self-defence, be obliged to put forth 
that power which Judas knew that he pos- 
sessed ? And were he to do so, things could 
not remain any longer as they were. The 
Passover — this great gathering of the people 
— would soon go past, and he, Judas, and the 

rest, have to resume their weary journeyings 
2 


26 


THE BETRaYAL AND 


on foot throughout Judea. Thus and then it 
was, that, in all likelihood, the thought 
flashed into the mind of the betrayer to go 
and ask the chief priests what they would 
give him if he delivered Jesus into their 
hands. They offered him thirty pieces of 
silver, a very paltry bribe — the price in 
the old Hebrew code of a slave that was 
gored by an ox — less than £5 of our money ; 
— a bribe insufficient of itself to have tempt- 
ed even a grossly avaricious man, in the posi- 
tion in which Judas was, to betray his Mas- 
ter, knowing or believing that it was unto 
death. Why, in a year or two Judas might 
have realized as much as that by petty pil- 
ferings from the apostolical bag. But this 
scheme of his would bring his Master to the 
test. It would expedite what, to his cove- 
tous, ambitious heart, had seemed to be that 
slow and meaningless course to a throne and 
kingdom which his Master had been pursu- 
ing. Not suspecting what the immediate 
and actual issue was to be, he made his un- 
holy compact with the High Priests. He 


THE BETRAYER. 


27 


made it on the Wednesday of the Passion 
week. Next evening he sat with Jesns in 
the supper-chamber. He found himself de- 
tected ; more than one terrible warning was 
sounded in his ears. Strange, you may 
think, that instead of stopping him in his 
course, these warnings suggested, perhaps for 
the first time, the thought that what he had 
engaged to do might be done that very night. 
The words, “What thou doest do quickly,” 
themselves gave eagerness and firmness to 
his purpose ; for, after all, though Jesus 
seemed for the time so much displeased, — let 
this scheme hut prosper, — let the kingdom be 
set up, and would he not be sure to forgive 
the offence that had hastened so happy a 
result ? 

Have we any grounds for interpreting in 
this way the betrayal ? Are we right in at- 
tributing such motives to Judas? If not, 
then how are we to explain his surprise when 
he saw his Master, though still possessing all 
his wonderful power, as he showed by the 
healing of the servant’s ear, allow himself to 


28 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


be bound and led away like a felon ? How 
are we to explain the consternation of Judas 
when he learned that though Jesus publicly, 
before the Sanhedrim, claimed to be' the 
Christ, the Son of God, the King of Israel, 
yet, instead of there being any acquiescence 
in that claim, a universal horror was ex- 
pressed, and on the very ground of his mak- 
ing it, he was doomed to the death of a blas- 
phemer ? Then it was, when all turned out 
so differently from what he had anticipated, 
that the idea of his having been the instru- 
ment of his Master’s death entered like iron 
into the soul of Judas. Then it was, that, 
overwhelmed with nameless, countless dis- 
appointments, vexations, self-reproaches, his 
very living to see his Master die became in- 
tolerable to him, and in his despair he flung 
his ill-used life away. 

Accept such solution, and the story of the 
betrayal of our Lord becomes natural and con- 
sistent ; reject it, and have you not difficulties 
in your way not to be got over by any amount 
of villany that you may attribute to the trai- 


THE BETRAYER. 


29 


tor ? But does not this solution take down 
the crime of Judas from that pinnacle o f 
almost superhuman and unapproachable guilt 
on which many seem inclined to place it ? It 
does ; but it renders it all the more available 
as a beacon of warning to us all. For if we 
are right in the idea we have formed of the 
character and conduct of Judas, there have 
been many since his time, there may be many 
still, in the same way, and from the operation 
of the same motives, betrayers of Christ. For 
everywhere he is a Judas, with whom his 
worldly interests, his worldly ambition, pre- 
vail over his attachment to Christ and to 
Christ’s cause ; who joins the Christian so- 
ciety, it may not be to make gain thereby, — 
but who, when the occasion presents itself, 
scruples not to make what gain he can of that 
connexion ; who, beneath the garb of the 
Christian calling, pursues a dishonest traffic ; 
who, when the gain and the godliness come 
into collision, sacrifices the godliness for the 
gain. How many such Judases the world 
has seen, how much of that Judas spirit there 


30 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


may be in our own hearts, I leave it to your 
knowledge of yourselves and your knowledge 
of the world to determine. 

Let us now resume our narrative of the ar- 
rest. Whatever lingering reluctance to touch 
Christ had been felt, that kiss of Judas re- 
moved. They laid their hands upon him in- 
stantly thereafter, grasping him as if he were 
a vulgar villain of the highway, and binding 
him after the merciless fashion of the Romans. 
This is what one, at least, of his followers 
can not bear. Peter springs forth from the 
darkness, draws his sword, and aims at the 
head of the first person he sees ; who, how- 
ever, bends to the side, and his ear only is 
lopped off. To Christ an unwelcome act of 
friendship. It ruffles his composure, it im- 
pairs the dignity of his patience. For the 
first and only time a human creature suffers 
that he may be protected. The injury thus 
done he must instantly repair. They have 
his hand within their hold, when, gently say- 
ing to them, “ Suffer ye thus far,” he releases 
it from their grasp, and, stretching it out 


THE BETRAYER. 


31 


touches the bleeding ear, and heals it : — the 
only act of healing wrought on one who nei- 
ther asked it of him, nor had any faith in his 
healing virtue ; but an act which showed how 
full of almighty power that hand was which 
yet gave itself up to ignominious bonds. 
Then said Jesus to Peter, “ Put up again thy 
sword into his place : for all they that take 
the sword shall perish with the sword. Think- 
est thou that I can not now pray to my 
Father, and he shall presently give me more 
than twelve legions of angels ? But how 
then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus 
it must be ? The cup which my Father hath 
given me, shall I not drink it ?” He was 
drinking then, even at that time, of the same 
cup in regard to which he had been praying 
in the Garden. Not only his agonies in Geth- 
semane and on the Cross, but all his griefs, 
internal and external, were ingredients in that 
cup which, for us and for our salvation, he 
took, and drank to the very dregs — a cup 
put by his Father’s hand into his, and by him 
voluntarily taken, that the will of his Father 


32 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


might be done, and that the Scriptures might 
he fulfilled. All this about the cup, and his 
Father, and the Scriptures, spoken for the in- 
struction and reproof of Peter, must have 
sounded not a little strange to those Chief 
Priests and scribes and elders who have come 
out to be present, at least, if not to take part 
in the apprehension, and who are now stand- 
ing by his side. But for them, too, there 
must be a word, to show them that he is after 
all a very brother of our race, who feels as 
any other innocent man would feel if bound 
thus, and led away as a malefactor. “ And 
Jesus said unto the chief priests, and captains 
of the temple, and the elders, which were 
come to him, Be ye come out, as against a 
thief, with swords and staves ? When I was 
daily with you in the temple, ye stretched 
forth no hands against me : but this is your 
hour, and the power of darkness.” A short 
hour of fancied triumph theirs ; the powers 
of darkness permitted for a short season to 
prevail : but beyond that hour, light, and a 
full, glorious, eternal triumph his. 


THE BETRAYER. 


33 


“Then all the disciples forsook him and 
fled.” That utter desertion had been one of 
the incidents of this night of sorrows upon 
which his foreseeing eye had already fixed. 
“ The hour cometh,” he had said to them in 
the upper chamber, “ yea, is now come, that 
ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, 
and shall leave me alone : and yet I am not 
alone, because the Father is with me.” It 
was only during that hurried march from the 
Garden to the judgment-hall that Jesus was 
left literally and absolutely alone : not one 
friendly eye upon him ; not one friendly arm 
within his reach. But this temporary soli- 
tude, was it not the type of the inner, deeper 
solitude, in wdiich his whole earthly work was 
carried on ? — not the solitude of the hermit 
or the monk, — he lived ever with and among 
his fellow-men ; not the solitude of pride, 
sullenly refusing all sympathy and aid ; not 
the solitude of selfishness, creating around its 
icy centre a cold, bleak, barren wilderness; 
not the solitude of sickly sentimentality, for- 
ever crying out that it can find no one to un- 
2 * 


34 


THE BETRAYAL AND 


derstand or appreciate. No ; but the solitude 
of a pure, holy, heavenly spirit, into all whose 
deeper thoughts there was not a single human 
being near him or around him who could en- 
ter ; with all whose deeper feelings there was 
not one who could sympathize ; whose truest, 
deepest motives, ends, and objects, in living 
and dying as he did, not one could compre- 
hend. Spiritually, and all throughout, the 
loneliest man that ever lived was J esus Christ. 
But there were hours when that solitude 
deepened upon his soul. So was it in the 
Garden, when, but a stone-cast from the near- 
est to him upon earth, even that broken, im- 
perfect sympathy which their looking on him 
and watching with him in his great sorrow 
might have supplied, was denied to him, and 
an angel had to be sent from heaven to cheer 
the forsaken one of earth. So was it upon 
the cross, in that dread moment, when he 
could no longer even say, u I am not alone, 
for my Father is with me when there burst 
from his dying lips that cry — a cry from the 
darkest, deepest, dreariest loneliness into 


THE BETRAYER. 


35 


which a pure and holy spirit ever passed — 
“ My God, my God ! why hast thou forsaken 
me ?” 

Shall we pity him, — in that lonely life, 
these lonely sufferings, that lonely death? 
Our pity he does not ask. Shall we sym- 
pathize with him? Our sympathy he does 
not need. But let us stand by the brink of 
that deep and awful gulf into which he de- 
scended, and through which he passed ; and 
let wonder, awe, gratitude, love, enter into 
and fill all our hearts, as we remember that 
that descent and that passage were made to 
redeem our souls from death, and to open up 
a way for us into a sinless and sorrowless 
heaven. 


II. 


©ft* Hkjmrtmtw, mxi l ^je^farnti^n 

0f K I tUx* 

When they saw their Master hound and 
borne away, all the disciples forsook him and 
fled. Two of them, however, recovered 
speedily from their panic. Foremost now, 
and bravest of them all, John first regained 
his self-possession, and returning on his foot- 
steps followed the band which conveyed Je- 
sus to the residence of the High Priest. 
Coming alone, and so far behind the others, 
he might have found some difficulty in get- 
ting admission. The day had not yet dawned, 
and at so early an hour, and upon so unusual 
an occasion, the keeper of the outer door 


* Matthew xxvi. 57-59, 69-75; Markxiv. 54, 55, 66-72; Luke 
xxii. 54-62 ; John xviii. 15-27 ; Mark xvi. 7 ; John xxi. 15-17. 


THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, ETC. 37 

might have hesitated to admit a stranger ; but 
John had some acquaintance with the domes- 
tics of the High Priest, and so got entrance ; 
an entrance which Peter might not have ven- 
tured to ask, or asking, might have failed to 
get, had not John noticed him following in 
the distance, and, on looking back as he en- 
tered, seen him standing outside the door. He 
went, therefore, and spoke to the porteress, 
who at his instance allowed Peter to pass in. 
The two disciples made their way together 
into the interior quadrangular hall, at the up- 
per and raised end of which Jesus was being 
cross-examined by Annas. It was the cold- 
est hour of the night, the hour that precedes 
the dawn, and the servants and officers had 
kindled a fire in that end of the hall where 
they were gathered. Peter did not wish to be 
recognized, and the best way he thought to 
preserve his incognito was to put at once the 
boldest face he could upon it, act as if he had 
been one of the capturing band and had as 
good a right to be there as others of that 
mixed company, as little known in this palace 


88 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

as himself. So stepping boldly forward, and 
sitting down among the men who were warm- 
ing themselves around the fire, he made him- 
self one of them. The woman who kept the 
door was standing near. The strong light of 
the kindling fire, falling upon that group of 
faces, her eye fell upon Peter’s. That surely, 
it occurred to her as she looked at it, was the 
face of the man whom she had admitted a few 
minutes ago, of whose features she had caught 
a glimpse as he passed by. She looks again, 
and looks more earnestly.* Her first impres- 
sion is confirmed. It is John’s friend ; that 
Galilean’s friend ; some friend too, no doubt, 
of this same Jesus. She says so to a com- 
panion by her side; but not satisfied with 
that, wondering, perhaps, at the way in which 
Peter was comporting himself, she waits till 
she has caught his eye, and going up to him 
she says : “ Art not thou also one of this 
man’s disciples ?” — a short, abrupt, peremp- 
tory, unexpected challenge. It takes Peter 
entirely by surprise. It throws him wholly 

* See John xviil 17 j Mark xiv. 67 ; Luke xxii. 56. 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


39 


off his guard. There they are, the eyes of all 
those men around now turned inquiringly 
upon him; and there she is — a woman he 
knows nothing of — perhaps had scarcely 
noticed as he passed quickly through the 
porch, — a woman who can know nothing about 
him, yet putting that pert question, to which, 
if he is to keep up the character he has as- 
sumed, there must be a quick and positive 
reply. And so the first hasty falsehood es- 
capes his lips. The woman, however, won’t 
believe him when he says that he does not 
understand her question. Both to himself and 
to others around her, she re-affirms her first 
belief. Peter has to back his first falsehood 
by a second and a third: “ Woman, I am not 
one of this man’s disciples; I know him 
not.” — Peter’s first denial of his Master. 

He has now openly committed himself, and 
he must carry the thing through as best he 
can. He is not at ease, however, in his seat 
with the others around the fire. The glare 
of that light is too strong. Those prying eyes 
disturb. As soon as conveniently he can, 


40 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

without attracting notice, he rises and retires 
into the shadow of the porch, through which 
in entering he had passed. A cock now crows 
without. He hears hut heeds it not. Per- 
haps he might have done so, had not another 
woman — some friend in all likelihood of the 
porteress with whom she had been convers- 
ing — been overheard by him affirming most 
positively, as she pointed him out, “ This fel- 
low also was with Jesus of Nazareth.” And 
she too comes up to him and repeats the say- 
ing to himself. The falsehood of the first 
denial he has now to repeat and justify. He 
does so with an oath, declaring, “ I do not 
know the man.” — Peter’s second denial of his 
Master. 

A full hour has passed. The examination 
going on at the other end of the hall has 
been engrossing the attention of the onlook- 
ers. Peter’s lost composure and self-confi- 
dence have in a measure been regained. He 
is out in the hall again, standing talking with 
the others ; no glare of light upon his face, 
yet little thinking all the while that by his 


RESTORATION - OF ST. PETER. 


41 


very talking he is supplying another mode of 
recognition. And now for the third time, 
and from many quarters, he is challenged. 
One said, u Of a truth this fellow was with 
him.” A second : “ Did I not see thee with 
him in the garden ?” A third : “ Thy speech 
bewrayeth thee.” Beset and badgered thus, 
Peter begins to curse and to swear, as he 
affirms, “ I know not the man of whom you 
speak.” — Peter’s third and last denial of his 
Lord. 

Truly a very sad and humbling exhibition 
this of human frailty. But is it one so rare ? 
Has it seldom been repeated since? Have 
we never ourselves been guilty of a like 
offence against our Saviour? Is there no 
danger that we may again be guilty of it ? 
That we may be prepared to give a true 
answer to such questions, let us consider 
wherein the essence of this offence of the 
Apostle consisted, and by what steps he was 
led to its commission. His sin against his 
Master lay in his being ashamed and afraid 
to confess his connexion with him, when 


42 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

taunted with it at a time when apparently 
confession could do Christ no good, and 
might damage greatly the confessor. It was 
rather shame than fear, let us believe, which 
led to the first denial. It was in moral 
courage, not physical, that Peter failed. By 
nature he was brave as he was honest. It 
was no idle boast of his, “ Lord, I will follow 
thee to prison and to death.” Had there 
been any open danger to be faced, can we 
doubt that he would gallantly have faced it ? 
Had his Master called him to stand by his 
side in some open conflict with his enemies, 
would Peter have forsaken him ? His was 
one of but two swords in the garden ; those 
two against all the swords and other weapons 
of* that multitude. But even against such 
odds, Peter, bold as a lion, drew his sword, 
and had the use of it been allowed, would 
have fought it out, till he had died by his 
Master’s side. But it is altogether a new 
and unexpected state of things, this willing 
surrender of himself by Jesus into the hands 
of his enemies ; this refusal, almost rebuke, 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


43 


of any attempt at rescue or defence. It un- 
settles, it overturns all Peter’s former ideas 
of his Master’s power, and of the manner in 
which that power was to be put forth. He 
can make nothing of it. It looks as if all 
those fond hopes about the coming kingdom 
W T ere indeed to perish. Confused, bewil- 
dered, Peter enters the High Priest’s hall. 
Why should he acknowledge who he is, or 
wherefore he is there ? What harm can 
there be in his appearing for the time as in- 
different to Christ’s fate as any of these offi- 
cers and servants among whom he sits ? 
That free and easy gait of theirs he assumes ; 
goes in with all they say ; perhaps tries to 
join with them in their coarse, untimely 
mirth. First easy yet fatal step, this taking 
on a character not his own. He is false to 
himself before he proves false to his Master. 
The acted lie precedes the spoken one ; pre- 
pares for it, almost necessitates it. It was 
the rash act of sitting down with those men 
at that fireside, that assumption of the mask, 
the attempt to appear to be what he was not, 


44 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

which set Peter upon the slippery edge of 
that slope, down which to such a depth he 
afterwards descended. Why is it we think 
so ? Because we have asked ourselves the 
question, Where all this while was his com- 
panion John, and how was it faring with 
him ? He too was within the hall, yet there 
is no challenging or badgering of him. The 
domestics of the dwelling indeed know him, 
and he may be safe from any interference on 
their part ; but there are many here besides 
who know as little about him as they do 
about Peter. Yet never once is John ques- 
tioned or disturbed. And why, but because 
he had joined none of their companies, had 
attempted no disguise ; his speech was not 
heard bewraying him. Had you looked for 
him there, you would have found him in 
some quiet shaded nook of that quadrangle, 
as near his Master as he could get, yet in- 
viting no scrutiny, exposing himself to no 
detection. 

That first false act committed, how natu- 
ral with Peter was all that followed ! His 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


45 


position, once taken, had to be supported, had 
to be made stronger and stronger to meet the 
renewed and more impetuous assaults. So is 
it with all courses of iniquity. The fatal step 
is the first one, taken often thoughtlessly, 
almost unconsciously. But our feet get hope- 
lessly entangled ; the weight that drags us 
along the incline gets at every step the 
heavier, till onward, downward we go into 
depths that our eyes at the first would have 
shuddered to contemplate, our souls revolting 
at the thought that we should ever have been 
found there. In this matter, then, of denying 
our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, let us not 
be high-minded, but fear; and, taking our 
special warning from that first false step of 
Peter, should we ever happen to be thrown 
into the society of those who bear no liking 
to the name or the cause of the Redeemer, 
let us beware lest, hiding in inglorious shame 
our faces from him, we be tempted to say or 
to do what for us, with our knowledge, would 
be a far worse thing to say or do, than what 


46 THE DENIALS, BEPENTANCE, AND 

was said and done by Peter, in his ignorance, 
w T ithin the High Priest’s hall. 

The oaths with which he sealed his third 
denial were yet fresh on Peter’s lips,* when a 
second time the cock crew without. And 
that shrill sound was yet ringing in his ears 
when “ the Lord turned and looked upon 
Peter.” How singularly well-timed that look ! 
The Lord is waiting till the fit moment come, 
and instantly seizes it. It might be wrong 
in us to say that but for the look, the second 
cock-crowing would have been as little heeded 
as the first. It might be wrong in us to say 
that, but for the awakening sound, the look 
would of itself have failed in its effect. But 
we can not be wrong in saying that the look 
and the sound each helped the other, and that 
it was the striking and designed coincidence 
of the two — their conjunction at the very time 
when Peter was confirming that third denial 
by those oaths — that formed the external 
agency which our Lord was pleased to con- 

* “ Immediately, while he yet spake, the cock crew.” Luke, 
xxii. 60. See also Matt., xxvi. 74. 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


47 


struct and employ for stirring the sluggish 
memory and quickening the dead conscience 
of the apostle. And sluggish memories, dead 
consciences, are they not often thus awakened 
by striking outward providences co-operating 
with the Word and with the Spirit ? Have 
none of us been startled thus, as Peter was, 
amid our denials or betrayals of our Master ? 
Let us bless the instrument, whatever it may 
be, by which so valuable a service is ren- 
dered, and see in its employment only an- 
other proof of the thoughtful, loving care of 
him who would not let us be guilty of such 
offences without some means being taken to 
alarm and to recover. 

Let us believe, however, that of the two — 
the sound and the look — the chief power and 
virtue lay in the latter. “ The Lord turned.” 
He turned from facing those scowling judges ; 
from listening to all the false testimony 
brought forward against him ; from bearing 
all the insults that masters and servants were 
heaping upon him ; from all the excitements 
of a trial which he knew was to end in his 


48 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

condemnation unto death. Forgetful of self, 
still thoughtful of his own, u He turned and 
looked upon Peter.” Was that a look of an- 
ger ; of unmingled, unmitigated rebuke ? 
Such a look might have sent Peter away to 
hang himself as Judas did ; but never to shed 
such tears of penitence as he went out to 
weep. The naked eye of the very Godhead 
might be on us ; but if from that eye there 
looked out nothing but stern, rebuking, re- 
lentless wrath, the look of such an eye might 
scorch and wither, but never melt and subdue 
hearts like ours. Doubtless there was re- 
proach in the look which Jesus bent upon 
Peter ; gentle reproach, all the more powerful 
because of its gentleness. But that reproach, 
quickly as it was perceived, and keenly as it 
was felt, formed but the outward border or 
fringe of an expression, the body of which 
was tender, forgiving, sympathizing love. 
Volumes of pity and compassion lay enfolded 
in that look. It told the apostle how well 
He, of whom he had just been saying that he 
knew him not, knew him; how thoroughly he 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


49 


knew him when he forewarned him of his fall. 
But it told Peter at the same time, that it 
was no thought or feeling of the injury or 
wrong that had been done personally to him- 
self, which made Jesus fix now so earnest a 
gaze upon him. Not so much of himself as 
of Peter was he thinking : not for himself, 
hut for Peter was he caring. It was the 
thought of that wrong which Peter had been 
doing to himself, which winged the look, and 
sent it on its hallowed errand into Peter’s 
heart. He felt, as it fell upon him, that it 
was the look of one, not angrily complaining 
of injury, not indignantly demanding redress, 
but only longing for it that Peter might feel 
how unkindly, ungratefully, ungenerously, he 
had acted towards such a Master ; of one who 
washed him above all things to be assured 
that if he but saw and felt his error, there 
was readiness and room enough in his heart 
to receive him back at once and fully into 
favor, — to forgive all, forget all, be all to him 
he had ever been. Another kind of look the 
apostle might have encountered unflinchingly, 


50 THE DENIALS, BEI ENTANCE, AND 

but not a look like that. Instantly there 
flashed upon his memory those words of 
prophetic warning, spoken a few hours before 
in the guest-chamber. Thrice had Jesus fore- 
warned him, that before the cock crew twice, 
he should thrice deny him. Had he never 
thought of these words till now ? In the dis- 
traction of the moment he might have allowed 
the first cock-crowing to pass by unheeded, 
but how could that whole hour* which fol- 
lowed his two earliest denials have gone past, 
without the striking warning occurring once 
to his memory? Very strange it seems to 
us ; but very strange are the moods and pas- 
sions of the mind — what is remembered by it, 
and what forgotten, when some new strong 
tide of thought and feeling rushes into, fills, 
and agitates the soul. In the strange, unex- 
pected, perilous position in which he had so 
suddenly been placed, Peter had forgotten 
all ; — the meeting of the upper chamber, the 
triple warning, the “ Verily verily, I say 
unto you,” which had then sounded in his 


* Luke xxii. 59. 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


51 


ears. But now, as if the awakened memory, 
by the very fulness and vividness of its recall, 
would repair the past forgetfulness, he sees 
all, hears all again. Those words of warning 
are anew ringing in his ears, and as he thinks 
how fearfully exact the fulfilment of those 
forgotten predictions of his Master has been, 
a sense of guilt and shame' oppresses him. 
He can bear that look no longer; he turns 
and hurries out of the hall, seeking a place to 
shed his bitter tears — tears not like those of 
Judas, of dismal and hopeless remorse, but of 
genuine and unaffected repentance. He goes 
out alone, but whither ? It was still dark. 
The day had not yet dawned. He would not 
surely at such an hour, and in such a state of 
feeling, go back at once into the city, to seek 
out and join the others who had fled. Such 
deep and bitter grief as his seeks solitude ; 
and where could he find a solitude so suitable 
as that wdiich his Lord and Master had so 
loved ? We picture him to our fancy as visit- 
ing alone the garden of Gethsemane, not now 
to sleep while his Lord is suffering; but to 


52 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

seek out the spot which Jesus had hallowed 
by his agony, to mingle his tears with the 
blood-drops which still bedew the sod. 

When and how he spent the two dismal 
days which followed we do not know. After 
that look from Him in the judgment-hall he 
never saw his Lord alive again. But as on 
the third morning we find John and him to- 
gether, we may believe that it was from the 
the lips of the beloved disciple — the only one 
of all the twelve who was present at the trial 
before Pilate, and who stood before the 
cross — that Peter heard the narrative of that 
day’s sad doings ; how they bound and 
scourged and mocked and spat upon the 
Lord ; how they nailed him to the cross, and 
set him up there in agony to die. And at 
each part of the sad recital, how would that 
heart, made so tender by penitence, be 
touched; how would it grieve Peter to re- 
member that he too had had a share in laying 
such heavy burdens on the last hours of his 
Lord’s suffering life ! That Master whom he 
had so dishonorably and ungratefully denied, 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


53 


was now sleeping in the grave. 0 but for 
one short hour with him — a single inter- 
view — that he might tell him how bitterly he 
repented what he had done, and get from his 
Master’s living, loving lips the assurance that 
he had been forgiven ! But that never was 
to be. He should never see him more. 
Never ! grief-blinded man ? Thine eye it 
sees not, thine ear it hears not, neither can 
that sorrow-burdened heart of thine conceive 
what even now Jesus is preparing for thee. 
The third morning dawns. The Saviour rises 
triumphant from the grave ; in rising, sets 
the angels there as sentries before the empty 
tomb ; gives to them the order that, to the 
first visitants of the sepulchre, this message 
shall be ’given : “ Go, tell the disciples and 
Peter , that he is risen from the dead.” This 
message from the angel, Peter had not heard* 
when he and John ran out together to the 
sepulchre, and found it empty. But he heard 
it not long thereafter. Who may tell what 

* Mary Magdalene, on whose report they acted, had seen no 
angel on her first visit to the sepulchre. 


54 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

strange thoughts that singling out of him — 
that special mention of his name by those 
angelic watchers of the sepulchre — excited 
in Peter’s heart ? How came those angels to 
know or think of him at such a time as this? 
It could not be on motion of their own that 
they had acted. They must have got that 
message from the Lord himself, been told by 
him particularly to name Peter to the women. 
But was it not a thing most wonderful, that, 
in the very act of bursting the barriers of the 
grave, there should be such a remembrance 
of him on the part of that Master w T hom he 
had so lately denied ? Was it not an omen 
for good ? Peter had his rising hopes con- 
firmed, his doubts and fears all quenched, 
when, some time in the course of that fore- 
noon, waiting till John and he had parted — 
waiting till he could meet him alone, and 
speak to him with all the greater freedom 
and fulness — Jesus showed himself to Peter. 
Before he met the others to speak peace, 
he hastened to meet Peter to speak pardon. 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


55 


One of the first offices of the risen Saviour 
was to wipe away the tears of the penitent. 

“ Go your way/’ said the angel to the 
women at the sepulchre, “ tell his disciples 
and Peter, that he goeth before }^ou into 
Galilee ; there shall ye see him, as he said 
unto you.” The Paschal festival, and Christ’s 
own presence, kept the apostles for eight 
days and more in the holy city. But as, 
after those two interviews in the evenings of 
the first two Lord’s days of the Christian 
Church, Jesus did not appear to them again, 
presuming that he had gone before them to 
Galilee, the eleven also went thither. The 
return to their old homes and haunts, the 
sight of their nets and fishing-boats, the ab- 
sence of any specific instructions as to what 
they were to be, or what to do in the future, 
suggest to some of them the thought of tak- 
ing up again their earlier occupation. Seven 
of them are walking together one evening by 
the lake side. It is the best hour of all the 
day for fishing in it. The lake looks tempt- 
ing; the boats and the nets are near. Peter 


56 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

— the very one from whom we should have 
expected a first proposal of this kind to come 
— says to them, “ I go a fishing.” They all 
go with him. They toil all the night, hut 
catch nothing. As morning breaks they see 
a man standing on the shore, seen but dimly 
through the haze, but near enough to let his 
voice be heard across the water. “ Children,” 
he says, “have ye any meat?” They tell 
him they have none. “ Cast the net,” he 
replies, “on the right side of the ship, and 
ye shall find.” And now they are not able 
to draw it for the multitude of fishes. This 
could scarcely fail to recall to the memory of 
some at least within the boat, that other 
miraculous draught of fishes, by which, now 
nearly three years before, three out of the 
twelve apostles were taught to forsake all 
and follow Jesus, that he might make them 
fishers of men. This repetition of the 
miracle was nothing else than a symbolic re- 
newal of that first commission, intended to 
teach the twelve that their apostolic calling 
still held good. There was one, however, of 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


57 


the seven who gathered round Jesus at the 
morning meal which he spread for them on 
the shore, when their fisher’s toil was over, 
whose position towards that commission and 
apostleship had become peculiar. He had 
been in the habit of taking a very prominent 
place among the twelve, had often acted 
as their representative and spokesman. But 
on the night of the betrayal, he had played 
a singularly shameful and inconsistent part. 
They had all, indeed, forsaken their Master ; 
but who would have thought that the very 
one of them who that night had been so 
vehement in his assertions that though all 
men, all his fellow-disciples, should forsake 
his Master, he never would, should yet so 
often, and with such superfluous oaths, have 
denied that he ever knew, or had anything 
to do with Jesus ? True it was that Jesus 
had forgiven Peter. His fellow-disciples, 
also, had forgiven that overboastful magni- 
fying of himself above the others. There 
was something so frank about him, and so 

genuine ; such outgoings of an honest, manly, 

3* 


58 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

kindly, generous nature, that they could not 
bear against him any grudge. They were all 
now on their old terms with one another. 
But how will it stand with Peter if that apos- 
tolic work has to be taken up again ? How 
will he feel as to resuming his old position 
among the twelve ? Will he not, in the 
depth of that humility and self-distrust 
taught him by his great fall, shrink now from 
placing himself even on the same level with 
the others ? And how will his Lord and 
Master feel and act as to his re-instatement 
in that office from which by his transgression 
he might be regarded as having fallen ? To 
all these questions there were answers given, 
wken Jesus, once more singling Peter out, 
said to him, “ Simon, son of Jonas,” — the 
very giving him his old and double name 
sounding as a note of preparation, telling that 
some important question was about to be ad- 
dressed to him, — “ Simon, son of Jonas, 
lovest thou me more than these,” thy breth 
ren, my other disciples, do ? — a gentle ye 
distinct enough reminder of that former say 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


59 


ing : “ Though all men should be offended, 1 
never will a delicate yet searching probe, 
pressed kindly but firmly home into the 
depths of Peter’s heart ; a skilful method of 
testing and exhibiting the trueness and deep- 
ness of Peter’s repentance, without subject- 
ing him to the painful humiliation of having 
the terrible denials of his Master brought up 
and dwelt upon, either by Jesus in the way 
of charge, or by himself in the way of con- 
fession. The best way of trying any man 
whether he has really repented of any sinful 
deed is to place him again in the like cir- 
cumstances, and see if he will act in the like 
manner. This is the way in which the Lord 
now tries Peter. Will he again compare 
himself with the others ; will he set himself 
above them ; will he say as much now about 
his love being greater than theirs, as he did 
then about his courage ; will he repeat that 
boasting which which was the precursor of 
his fall? How touchingly does his answer 
show that he perfectly understood the in- 
volved reference to the past ; that he had 


60 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, AND 

thoroughly learned its humbling lessons ? 
No longer any comparing himself with or set- 
ting himself above others, — the old Peter- 
like frankness and fervor in the “ Yea, Lord, 
I love thee,” but a new humility in it, for he 
will not say how much he loves, still less will 
venture to say that he loves more than 
others ; and a still deeper humility in it, for 
he will not offer his own testimony as to 
the love he feels, he will trust no more that 
deceitful heart of his, nor ask his Lord to 
trust it, but throwing himself upon another 
knowledge of that heart which had proved 
to be better than its own, he says, “ Yea, 
Lord, thou hiowest that I love thee.” Our 
Lord’s reply is a most emphatic affirmative 
response to this appeal. It is as if he had 
said at large, “ Yes, Simon Barjona, I do 
know that thou lovest me. I know, too, that 
thou wouldst make no boast of thy love, nor 
in that or anything else set thyself any lon- 
ger above thy fellows ; and now, that these 
thy brethren might know and see it too, how 
hearty thy penitence has been, how thorough- 


RESTORATION OF ST. PETER. 


61 


ly it has done its humbling work, and how 
readily I own and acknowledge thee as being 
all to me thou ever wert ; therefore now, in 
presence of these brethren, I renew to thee 
the apostolic commission — publicly re-instate 
thee in the apostolic office — 6 Feed my 
sheep/ I need not ask thee again whether 
thou lovest me more than others. I will 
prove thee no more by that allusion to the 
past ; but I have once, twice, thrice to put 
that other general question to thee, that as 
three times I warned thee, and three times 
thou didst deny me, even so I may three 
times re-instate, restore.” Can we wonder 
that Peter was grieved, when for the third 
time that question, Lovest thou me? was put 
to him. It was not the grief of doubt, as if 
he suspected that Jesus only half-believed 
his word ; but the grief of that contrition 
which grows into a deeper sadness at the so 
distinct allusion to his three denials in that 
triple repetition of the question. And yet 
even in that sadness there is a comfort; 
the comfort of the feeling that his affectionate 


62 THE DENIALS, REPENTANCE, ETC. 

Master is giving him the opportunity of 
wiping away by threefold confession his three- 
fold denial. And so, with a fuller heart, and 
in stronger words than ever, will he make 
avowal of his love : “ Lord, thou knowest all 
things ; thou knowest that I love thee.” 


III. 

Mt 35ral Mm Mu JjtouMrtm.* 

The Jews regarded their day as beginning 
at one sunset and ending with the next. This 
interval was not divided into twenty-four 
parts or hours of equal and invariable length. 
They took each day by itself, from sunrise to 
sunset, and each night by itself, from sunset 
to sunrise, and divided each into twelve equal 
parts or hours ; so that a J ewish hour, instead 
of being, as it is with us, a fixed measure of 
time, varied in its length as each successive 
day and night varied in theirs at different 
seasons of the year. Neither did the Jews 
begin as we do, reckoning the twelve hours, 
into which the day and night were respect- 

* John xviii. 19-24; Luke xxil. 66-71 ; Matt. xxvi. 59-68; 
Mark xiv. 53-65. 


64 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


ively divided, from midday and midnight, but 
from sunset and sunrise ; their sixth hour of 
the night corresponding thus with our twelve 
o’clock, our midnight ; their sixth hour of the 
day with our twelve o’clock, our midday. 
There were but two periods of the year, those 
of the autumnal and vernal equinox, when, 
day and night being exactly equal, the length 
of the hours in both was precisely the same 
with our own. It was at one of these periods, 
that of the vernal equinox, that the Jewish 
Passover was celebrated, and it was on the 
day which preceded its celebration that our 
Lord was crucified. It was close upon the 
hour of sunrise on that day that Jesus was 
carried to the Praetorium, to be examined by 
the Homan Governor. Assuming that he en- 
tered Gethsemane about midnight, and re- 
mained there about an hour, the interval be- 
tween the Jewish seventh and twelfth hour 
of the night, or between our one and six 
o’clock of the morning, was spent in the trial 
before Annas and Caiphas, both reckoned as 
High Priests, the one being such de jure , the 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


65 


other de facto. They seem to have been liv- 
ing at this time in the same palace into the 
hall of which Jesns was carried immediately 
after his arrest. It was in this hall, and be- 
fore Annas, that Jesus was subjected to that 
preliminary informal examination recorded in 
the eighteenth* chapter of the Gospel of St. 
John. He was to be formally tried, with 
show at least of law, before the Sanhedrim, 
the highest of the Jewish courts, but this 
could not be done at once. Some time was 
needed to call the members of that court to- 
gether, and to consult as to the conduct of 
the trial. Annas was there from the first, 
awaiting the return of the band sent out to 
arrest the Saviour. His son-in-law Caiaphas 
was in all likelihood by his side, eager both 
and ready to proceed. But they could not 
act without their' colleagues, nor pronounce 
any sentence which they might call upon the 
Homan Governor at once to ratify and exe- 
cute. Whilst the messengers, however, are 
despatched to summon them, and the mem- 


* John xviii. 19-24. 


66 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


bers of the Sanhedrim are gathering, Annas 
may prepai e the way by sounding Christ, in a 
far-off, unofficial, conversational manner, and 
may perhaps extract from his replies some 
good material upon which the court may 
afterward proceed. Calling Jesus before him, 
he puts to him some questions about his disci- 
ples, and his doctrine ; questions fair enough, 
and proper enough as to their outward form, 
yet captious and inquisitorial, intended to en- 
tangle, and pointing not obscurely to the two 
main charges to be afterwards brought against 
him, of being a disturber of the public peace, 
and a teacher of blasphemous doctrines. 

First, then, about his disciples: Annas 
would like to know, what this gathering of 
men around him meant ; this forming them 
into a distinct society. By what bond or 
pledge to one another were the members of 
this new society united ; what secret instruc- 
tions had they got ; what hidden objects had 
they in view ? Though Christ might not re- 
veal the secrets of this combination, yet, let 
it but appear — as by his very refusal to give 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


67 


the required information it might he made to 
do — that an attempt was here being made to 
organize a confederation all over the country, 
how easy would it be to awaken the jealousy 
of the Roman authorities, and get them to 
believe that some insurrectionary plot was 
being hatched which it was most desirable at 
once to crush, by cutting off the ringleader. 
Such we know to have been the impression 
so diligently sought to be conveyed into the 
mind of Pontius Pilate. And Annas began 
by trying whether he could get Jesus to say 
anything that should give a color of truthful- 
ness to such an imputation. Penetrating at 
once this design of the questioner, knowing 
thoroughly what his real meaning and pur- 
poses were, our Lord utterly and indignantly 
denies the charge that was attempted thus to 
be fastened on him. Neither as to his disci- 
ples, nor as to his doctrine, — neither as to 
the instructions given to his followers, nor as 
to the bonds of their union and fellowship 
with one another, had there been anything of 
the concealed or the sinister; not one doc- 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


trine for the people without, and another for 
the initiated within ; no meetings under cloud 
of night in hidden places for doubtful or dan- 
gerous objects. “ I spake,” said Jesus to this 
first questioner, “ openly to the world ; I ever 
taught in the synagogue and in the temple, 
whither the Jews always resort; and in se- 
cret” — that is, in the sense in which I know 
that you mean and use that term — “ have I 
said nothing.” 

But now the questioner must have rolled 
back upon himself a question, which tells him 
how naked and bare that hypocritical heart 
of his lay to the inspection of the questioned : 
“ Why askest thou me ?” Put that question, 
Annas, to thy heart, and let it answer thee, 
if it be not so deceitful as to hide its secrets 
from thine own eyes. “ Why askest thou 
me ?” Art thou really so ignorant as thou 
pretendest to be ; thou, who hast had thy 
spies about me for well-nigh three years, 
tracking my footsteps, watching my actions, 
reporting my words ? “ Why askest thou 

me ?” Dost thou really care to know, as these 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


69 


questions of thine would seem to indicate ? 
then go, u ask them which heard me, what I 
have said unto them : behold, they know what 
I said.” A boldness here, a touch of irony, 
a stroke of rebuke, which, perhaps, our Lord 
might not have used, had it been upon his 
seat and in his office as President of the San- 
hedrim that the High Priest was speaking to 
him ; had it not been for the mean advantage 
which he was trying to take of him ; had it 
not been for the cloak of hypocrisy which, in 
trying to take that advantage, he had as- 
sumed. We shall see presently, at least, that 
our Lord’s tone and manner were somewhat 
different when his more formal trial come on. 
Christ’s sharp sententious answer to Annas 
protected him — and perhaps that was one of 
its chief purposes — from the repetition and 
prolongation of the annoyance. It seems to 
have silenced the High Priest. He had made 
but little by that way of interrogating his 
prisoner, and he wisely gives it up. What- 
ever resentment he cherished at being checked 
and spoken to in such a manner, he restrained 


70 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


himself from any expression of it, hiding the 
hour when all the hitter pent-up hatred at the 
Nazarene might find fitter and fuller vent. 

But there was one of his officers who could 
not so restrain himself, who could not hear to 
see his master thus insulted, and who, in the 
heat of his indignation, struck Christ with the 
palm of his hand, — some forward official, who 
thought in this way to earn his master’s favor, 
hut who only earned for himself the unenvi- 
able notoriety of having been the first to be- 
gin those acts of inhuman violence with which 
the trial and condemnation of Jesus were so 
largely and disgracefully interspersed. Others 
afterwards came forward to mock and to jos- 
tle and to blindfold, and to smite and to spit 
upon our Lord, to whom he answered no- 
thing ; hut, whether it was that there was 
something in this man which made our Sa- 
viour’s words to him peculiarly needful and 
peculiarly appropriate, or whether it was that 
at this early stage of the proceedings Jesus 
was using the same freedom with the servant 
which he had used with the master, — when 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


71 


he inflicted that first stroke, and said to Je- 
sus, “ Answerest thou the High Priest so ?” 
— Jesus did not receive the stroke in silence. 
He answered the question by another : “ If I 
have spoken evil, hear witness of the evil ; 
but if well, why smitest thou me ?” Best 
comment this on our Lord’s own precept : “ If 
thy brother smite thee on the one cheek, turn 
to him the other also and a general key to 
all like Scripture precepts, teaching us that 

the true observance of them lies not in the 

* 

fulfilment of them as to the letter, but in the 
possession and exhibition of the spirit which 
they prescribe. How much easier would it 
be when smitten upon the one cheek, to turn 
the other for a second stroke, than to be alto- 
gether like our Lord in temper and spirit un- 
der the infliction of the stroke ! More diffi- 
cult, also, than any silence, to imitate that 
gentle answer. The lip might keep itself 
closed, while the heart was burning with 
anger. But it was out of the depths of a per- 
fect patience, a gentleness which nothing 
could irritate, a condescension which stooped, 


72 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


even while smitten, to remonstrate, that the 
saying came : “ If I have spoken evil, bear 
witness of the evil ; but if well, why smitest 
thou me ?” “ Think,” says Chrysostom, “ on 

him who said these words, on him to whom 
they were said, and on the reason why they' 
were said, and these words will, with divine 
power, cast down all wrath which may rise 
within thy soul.” 

But now at last the whole Council has 
assembled, Caiaphas has taken his seat as 
President, and they may go more formally 
to work. Their object is to convict him of 
some crime which shall warrant their pro- 
nouncing upon him the severest sentence of 
the law. That the appearance of justice 
may be preserved,* they must have wit- 
nesses ; these witnessess must testify to some 
speech or act of Christ, which would involve 


* It would appear that in holding their Council during the 
night, and in condemning Christ solely upon his own confession, 
the Jews violated express enactments of their own code. See 
“Jesus devant Caiphe et Pilate — Refutation du chapitre de M. 
Salvador, intitule ‘Jugement et Condamnation de Jesus,’” par 
M. Dupin. 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


73 


him in that doom; and as to any specific 
charge, two of these witnesses must agree 
before they can condemn. They could have 
got plenty of witnesses to testify as to 
Christ’s having within the last few days 
openly denounced themselves, the members 
of the Sanhedrim, as fools and blind, hypo- 
crites, a very generation of vipers; but to 
have convicted Christ upon that count or 
charge would have given to their proceeding 
against him the aspect of personal revenge. 
They could have got plenty of witnesses to 
testify as to Christ’s having often broken and 
spoken slightingly of ordinances and tradi- 
tions of the Pharisees ; but there were Sad- 
ducees among their own members, and the 
Council might thus have been divided. They 
could have got plenty of witnesses to testify 
as to Christ’s frequent profanation of the 
Sabbath; but how should they deal with 
those miracles, in or connected with the per- 
formance of which so many of these cases of 
profanation of the Sabbath had occurred ? 
They are in difficulty about their witnesses. 


74 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


They bring forth many ; but either the 
charge which their testimony proposes to 
establish against Christ, comes not up to the 
required degree of criminality, or the clumsy 
testifiers, brought hastily forward, undrilled 
beforehand, break down in their witness - 
giving. Two, however, do at last appear, 
who seem at first sight to agree ; but when 
minutely questioned as to the words which 
they allege that more than two years before 
they had heard him utter about the destruc- 
tion of the Temple, they report them differ- 
ently, so that u neither did their witness 
agree.” The prosecution is in danger of 
breaking down through want of sufficient 
proof. 

All this time, the accused has observed a 
strange — to his judges an unaccountable and 
provoking silence. He hears as though he 
heard not — cared not — were indifferent about 
the result. It is more than the presiding 
judge can stand. He rises from his seat, 
and, fixing his eyes on Jesus, says to him, 
u Answerest thou nothing ? ” Hast thou 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


75 


nothing to say ?— no question to put, no ex- 
planation to offer, as to what these witnesses 
testify against thee ? Jesus returns the 
look, hut there is no reply : he stands as 
silent, as unmoved as ever. Baffled, per- 
plexed, irritated, the High Priest will try 
yet another way with him. Using the accus- 
tomed Jewish formula for administering an 
oath — a formula recited by the judge, and 
accepted without repetition by the respond- 
ent — “ I adjure thee,” said the High Priest, 
“ by the living God, that thou tell us whether 
thou be the Christ, the Son of God.” Ap- 
pealed to thus solemnly, by the first magis- 
trate of his nation, sitting in presidency over 
the highest of its courts, our Lord keeps 
silence no longer. But it is in words of 
wonder that he replies to the High Priest’s 
adjuration. He sees quite through the pur- 
pose of the questioner. He knows quite 
well what will be the immediate issue of his 
reply. Yet he says, U I am;” I am the 
Christ, the Son of the Blessed ; “ and ye ”— 
ye who are sitting there now as my judges, — • 


76 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


“ ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the 
right hand of power, and coming in the 
clouds to heaven.” It is our Lord’s own 
free and full confession, his public and solemn 
assertion of his claim to the Messiahship, and 
Sonship to God. The time for all conceal- 
ment or reserve is past. Jesus will now 
openly, not only take to himself his own 
name, assume his office, and assert his Divine 
prerogatives, but in doing so, he will let 
those earthly dignitaries, who have dragged 
him thus to their tribunal, before whose judg- 
ment-seat he stands, know that the hour is 
coming which shall witness a strange reversal 
in their relative positions, — he being seen 
sitting on the seat of power, and they, with 
all the world beside, seen standing before his 
bar, as on the clouds of heaven he comes to 
judge all mankind. 

The effect of this confession, this sublime 
unfolding of his true character, and prophecy 
of his second coming, was immediate, and 
though extraordinary, not unnatural. The 
High Priest, as soon as he drank in the real 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


77 


meaning of the words which fell on his aston- 
ished ear, grasped his mantle, and rent it in 
real or feigned horror, exclaiming, “ He hath 
spoken blasphemy.” Then rose up also the 
other judges who were sitting round him, ex- 
cited to the highest pitch, each one more 
eager than the other, to put this question to 
the accused, “ Art thou then the Son of 
God ?” to all of whom there is the same 
answer as to Caiaphas, “ I am.” “ What 
further need, then,” says the President of the 
Court to his brother judges, “ have we of wit- 
nesses ? Now ye have heard his blasphemy. 
What think ye ?” “ What need we,” they 

say to him, taking up his own words, “ any 
further witnesses ? for we ourselves have 
heard it out of his own mouth.” And they 
“ answered and said, He is guilty of death. ”* 
The unanimous judgment of the Court is 
delivered, f and the sentence of death pro- 
nounced. 

Is there not one among all those judges 
within whose heart there rise some strange 

* See Deut. xiii. 5 ; xviii. 20. f Mark xiv< 64 


78 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


misgivings as he dooms this man to die ; not 
one whom the calmness, the serenity, the 
dignified hearing of the Lord, as he made the 
great revelation of himself before them, have 
impressed with wonder and with awe ? Per- 
haps there is ; but the tumult of that vehe- 
ment condemnation carries him away ; or if 
any inward voice be pleading for the accused, 
he quenches it by saying that, if Jesus really 
submit to such a sentence being executed 
upon him, he cannot be the Messiah, he must 
be a deceiver ; and so he lets the matter take 
its course. 

The pronouncing of the sentence from the 
bench was the signal for a horrible outburst 
of coarsest violence in the hall below. As if 
all license were theirs to do with him what 
they liked — as if they knew they could not 
go too far ; could do nothing that their mas- 
ters would not approve, perhaps enjoy — the 
men who held Jesus* (for it would seem they 
could not trust him, bound though he was, to 
stand there free before them), began to mock 


* Luke xxii. 63. 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


79 


him, and to buffet him, and to spit upon him, 
and to cover his eyes with their hands, say- 
ing, as they struck at him, “ Prophesy to us 
who it is that smiteth thee.” “ And many 
other things blasphemously spake they 
against him.” How long all this went on we 
know not. They had to wait till the proper 
hour for carrying Jesus before the Roman 
Governor arrived, and it was thus that the 
interval was filled up; the meek and the 
patient One, who was the object of all this 
scorn and cruelty, neither answering, nor 
murmuring, nor resisting, nor reproaching. 
There was but one man in that hall to look 
with loving, pitying eyes on him who was 
being treated thus ; and, in the words which 
that spectator penned long years thereafter 
in the distant lonely island, we may see some 
trace of the impression which the sight of 
the great sufferer made — “ I, John, who also 
am your brother and companion in tribula- 
tion, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus 
Christ.” 

The malignant antipathy to Christ cherished 


80 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


by the hierarchical party at Jerusalem had 
early ripened into an intention to cut him off 
by death. It was at the beginning of the 
second year of his ministry that he healed the 
impotent man at the pool of Bethesda. “ The 
man departed, and told the Jews that it was 
Jesus which had made him whole. And 
therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and 
sought to slay him, because he had done these 
things on the Sabbath-day. But Jesus an- 
swered them, My Father worketh hitherto, 
and I work. Therefore the Jews sought the 
more to kill him, because he not only had 
broken the Sabbath, but said" also that God was 
his Father, making himself equal with God.”* 
So far from repudiating this interpretation of 
his words, Jesus accepted and confirmed it ; 
enlarging the scope, without altering the na- 

* John y. 15-18. When, on a succeeding Sabbath Christ 
healed the man who had a withered hand, the Pharisees “ were 
filled with madness, and straightway took counsel with the Hero- 
dians against him how they might destroy him.” — Luke vi. 11 ; 
Mark iii. 6. Christ’s movements were, from the beginning and 
throughout, more regulated by the pressure of the persecution to 
which he was exposed, than a cursory reading of the Gospel nar- 
rative might lead us to imagine. — See John ii. 24 ; iv. 1-3 ; Mark 
i. 45 ; Luke v. 17 ; xi. 53-56. 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


81 


ture of what he had said about the Father, 
claiming not only unity in action, hut unity 
in honor with him.* So vengeful in their 
hatred did the Jews of Jerusalem become, that 
Jesus had to seek safety by retiring from 
Judea. In the course of the two years which 
followed, Jesus paid only two visits to the 
metropolis, and both were marked by out- 
breaks of the same implacable animosity. His 
appearance in Jerusalem at the Feast of Tab- 
ernacles excited such an instant and intense 
spirit of vindictiveness, that one of our Lord’s 
first sayings to the Jews in the Temple was, 
“ Why go ye about to kill me ?” So well 
known was the purpose of the rulers that it 
was currently said, “ Is rot this he whom 
they seek to kill ? But, lo, he speaketh 
boldly, and they say nothing unto him. Do 
the rulers know indeed that this is the very 
Christ ?”f Hearing that such things were 
said, the rulers sent their officers to seize him, 
but failed in the attempt to get him into their 
hands. They then confronted him in the 

f John vii. 25, 26. 


* John v. 33. 


82 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


Temple, and openly charged him with hearing 
a false record about himself. A strange dia- 
logue ensued, in the course of which, instead 
of retracting any thing which he had formerly 
said, or attempting to explain it away, Jesus 
not only exalted himself above Abraham, in 
whom they boasted, but declared, in language 
which they could only understand as an as- 
sumption by him of Divine prerogatives : 
“ Before Abraham was, I am.” So exaspe- 
rated were they when he said this, that they 
took up stones to cast at him ; and had he not 
made himself invisible, and so passed through 
the midst of them, they would, in the heat 
of the moment, and without troubling them- 
selves about any formal trial, have inflicted 
on him the doom of the blasphemer. Having 
lingered for a few days longer in the neigh- 
borhood of Jerusalem, wrought a memorable 
cure on the man born blind, and delivered 
that memorable discourse which John has pre- 
served to us in the 10th chapter of his Gos- 
pel, Jesus again retired from the capital. On 
his return, two months afterwards, at the 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


83 


Feast of Dedication, he was met as he walked 
in the Temple in Solomon’s Porch, and with 
some show of candor and anxiety, the ques- 
tion was put to him, u How long dost thou 
make us to doubt ? if thou he the Christ, tell 
us plainly.” J esus did not tell them so plainly 
as they desired, about his being the Christ, 
but he told them plainly enough, as he had 
done before, that he was the Son of God. 
“ I,” said he, “ and my Father are one. Then 
the Jews took up stones again to stone him. 
Jesus answered them, Many good works have 
I showed you from my Father : for which of 
those works do ye stone me ? The Jews an- 
swered him, saying, For a good work we stone 
thee not, but for blasphemy ; and because 
that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.” 
Again our Lord had to protect himself from 
the storm of their wrath by retreating to 
Persea. The message from the mourning 
sisters recalled him from this retreat. The 
raising from the dead of a man so well known 
as Lazarus, in a village so near to Jerusalem 
as Bethany, produced such an effect that a 


84 


THE TEIAL BEFORE 


meeting of the Sanhedrim was summoned to 
deliberate as to what should be done. The 
design which they had so long cherished, they 
now more deliberately than ever determined 
to accomplish : “ From that day forth they 
took counsel together to put him to death.”* 
Though hurried at last in the time and 
manner of its execution, it was no hasty pur- 
pose on the part of the members of the Jew- 
ish Council to put our Lord to death. The 
proposal of Judas did not take them by sur- 
prise, the arrest in the garden did not find 
them unprepared. They must often have 
deliberated how they should proceed if they 
once had him in their hands. And when he 
was at last before them for formal trial, and 
they were eager to get him condemned, they 
had not for the first time to consider what 
charges they should bring against him, and by 
what evidence the charges might be sus- 
tained. Witnesses enough of all kinds were 
within their easy reach, nor had they any 
scruple as to the means they took to get from 


* John xi. 53. 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


85 


them the evidence they wanted. But with 
all their facilities, and all their bribery, 
they could not substantiate a single charge 
against Jesus which would justify them in 
condemning him. Why, when they found 
themselves in such difficulty, did they not 
summon into their presence some of those 
who had heard Jesus commit that kind of 
blasphemy, upon the ground of which they 
had twice, upon the spur of the moment, at- 
tempted to stone him to death ? Testimony 
in abundance to that effect must have been 
lying ready to their hands. It seems clear to 
us that the first and earnest desire of the 
members of the Sanhedrim was to convict 
Christ of some other breach of their law, suf- 
ficient to justify the infliction of death ; and 
that it was not till every attempt of this kind 
had failed, that, as a last resort, the High 
Priest put our Lord himself upon his oath. 
In the form of adjuration which he employed, 
two separate questions were put to Christ : 
the one, Whether he claimed to be the 
Christ; the other, Whether he claimed to 


86 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


be the Son of God. These were not iden- 
tical. The latter title was not one which 
either Scripture or Jewish usage had attached 
to the Messiah. The patent act of blas- 
phemy which our Lord was considered as 
having perpetrated in presence of the Council 
was not his having asserted his Messiahship, 
but his having appropriated the other title to 
himself. When, after Christ had given his 
first affirmative reply to the complex chal- 
lenge of Caiaphas, the other judges interfered 
to interrogate the prisoner, they dropped all 
allusion to the Messiahship. “ Then said 
they all, Art thou then the Son of God ?” and 
it was upon our Lord’s reassertion that he 
was, — upon that, and that alone, that he was 
doomed to death as a blasphemer. For it 
was perfectly understood between the judges 
and the judged, that, in thus speaking of him- 
self, Jesus claimed a peculiar, an intrinsic 
affinity, — oneness in essence, knowledge, 
power, and glory, with the Father. His 
judges took Jesus to be only man, and look- 
ing upon him as such, they were so far right 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


87 


in regarding him as guilty of blasphemous pre- 
sumption. In this, then, one of the most 
solemn moments of his existence, when his 
character was at stake, when life and death 
were trembling in the balance, Jesus, fully 
aware of the meaning attached by his judges 
to the expression, claimed to be the Son of 
God. He heard, and heard without explana- 
tion or remonstrance, sentence of death passed 
upon him, for no other reason whatever but 
his making that claim. On any other suppo- 
sition than that of his having been really that 
which his judges regarded him as asserting 
that he was ; on any other supposition than 
that of his true and proper Divinity, this pas- 
sage of the Redeemer’s life becomes worse 
than unmeaning in our eyes. There would 
be something more here than the needless 
flinging away of a life, -by the absence of all 
attempt to remove the misconception (if mis- 
conception it had been), upon which the death 
sentence had been based. If only a man, if 
not the co-eternal, co-equal Son of the Father, 
in speaking of himself as he did before that 


88 


THE TRIAL BEFORE 


Jewish Council, Jesus was guilty of an ex- 
tent, an audacity, an effrontery of pretension, 
which the blindest, wildest, most arrogant 
religious enthusiast has never exceeded. The 
only way to free his character as a man from 
the stain of such egregious vanity and pre- 
sumption, is to recognize him as the Son of 
the Highest. If the Divinity that was in him 
he denied, the humanity no longer stands 
stainless. 

But we believe in both, and see both mani- 
fested in the very scene that is here before 
our eyes. Now, with the eye of sense we 
look on Jesus as he stands before this Jewish 
tribunal. It is the Man of sorrows, despised 
and rejected of men ; treated by those lordly 
judges, and the brutal band of servitors, as 
the vilest of felons, the very refuse of the 
earth. Again, with the eye of faith we look 
on him, and he seems as if transfigured before 
us, when, breaking the long-kept silence, he 
declares, “ I am the Son of God, and hereafter 
ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the 
right hand of power, and coming in the clouds 


THE SANHEDRIM. 


89 


of heaven.” From what a depth of earthly 
degradation, to what a height of superhuman 
dignity does J esus at once ascend ! And is 
it not striking to notice how he himself blends 
his humiliation and exaltation, his humanity 
and divinity, as he takes to himself the 
double title, and hinds it to his suffering 
brow : The Son of Man ; the Son of God . 


IV. 


&xx$t Qwmmt Mm litotes 

Christ’s trial before the Jewish Sanhedrim, 
closed in his conviction and condemnation. 
The strange commotion on the bench, in the 
midst of which the sentence was pronounced, 
and the outbreak of brutal violence on the 
part of the menials in the hall, being over, 
there was an eager and hurried consultation 
as to how that sentence which had been pro- 
nounced could most speedily be executed. 
Had the full power of carrying out their own 
sentence been in their own hands, there had 
been no difficulty ; Jesus would have been 
led out instantly to execution. But Judea 
was now under the Homan yoke ; one bond 
and badge of its servitude being this, that 


0 Matt. xv. i. ; Luke xxiii. 1-4 ; John xvii. 28-39. 


CHRIST BEFORE PILATE. 


91 


while the old Jewish courts were permitted 
to try and to punish minor offences, the final 
judgment of all capital offences was reserved 
for the Roman tribunals. A Roman judge 
must pass the sentence, or, at least, must 
sign the warrant that consigned the criminal 
to execution. At Jerusalem, these reserved 
cases were brought up for adjudication at the 
time of the great festivals, when the Roman 
Procurator, who resided ordinarily at Caesarea, 
visited the capital. For the last six years, 
Pontius Pilate had held this office in Judea, 
and he was now on occasion of this Passover 
in the city. His order, therefore, for the 
execution, must be obtained that forenoon, or 
perhaps not at all. It was now the last day 
before the Passover on which a court of jus- 
tice could be held ; and if not held before six 
o’clock that evening, when the Passover 
period began, then not for seven days there- 
after. To keep Christ so long in bonds, 
awaiting his presentation to the Roman judge, 
. — with an uncertainty, besides, whether Pilate 
would take up the case after the Passover, — • 


92 


CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 


that were a risk too perilous to run. They 
had, indeed, the whole day before them, and 
there was time enough to get Pilate’s judg- 
ment before the Passover commenced ; but 
to keep Jesus not only bound, but bound 
with the order for his crucifixion hanging 
over him ; to keep him so for eight days to 
come ; to keep him so till not only citizens 
of Jerusalem, but the inhabitants of the whole 
region round about, had heard all the particu- 
lars of his apprehension and condemnation, — 
that also were peril which must, if possible, 
be avoided. And it could only be avoided 
by getting the crucifixion over before that sun 
which was just about to rise had set. 

Obviously there was urgent need of haste. 
The consultation, therefore, was a brief and a 
hurried one. The resolution was taken to 
bind Jesus once more — bind him as men con- 
demned to death were wont to be bound — 
and to carry him at once to Pilate, and get 
from him the authority to proceed. Thither, 
therefore, to the official residence of the Pro- 
curator, accompanied by the whole multitude 


BEFORE PILATE. 


93 


that had assembled in and around the hall of 
Caiaphas, Jesus is conveyed. It is a house 
which the Gentile has occupied and polluted ; 
a house from which the leaven has not been 
cast out ; a house to cross whose threshold 
at such a time as this, on the very eve of 
the Passover, — was to disqualify the entrant 
from all participation in the holy rite. And 
though there he among their number those 
who, from their position and previous ac- 
quaintance, might well have claimed the priv- 
ilege of access, and asked a private audience 
of Pilate, to explain to him the nature of the 
case in which his interference at such an 
unseasonable hour was required, yet will not 
one of these precise, punctilious chief priests, 
scribes, and councillors venture into that 
dwelling, lest they should be defiled. They 
send in their message by some of Pilate’s 
officers or servants. At once, with Roman 
courtesy, he comes out to them — to where 
they are all standing around the bound and 
sentenced Jesus. The glance of a quick eye 
at once revealed to Pilate the general object 


94 


CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 


of this early visit. These, he knew, as his 
eye ran round the leaders of the crowd, were 
the Jewish judges, and this, as that eye rested 
upon Jesus, some one whom they were anx- 
ious to get punished. But why all this haste ? 
What can it have been that has brought 
together, at such an unusual hour, all these 
city magnates, and drawn them as suppliants 
to his door ? What extraordinary crime can 
this man, whom they have borne to him, have 
committed, that they are so impatient to see 
him punished ? He looks at Christ again. 
He had tried many ; he had condemned 
many ; his practised eye was familiar with 
the features which great guilt ordinarily 
wears, but he had never seen a great criminal 
look as this man looks ; nothing here either 
of that sunk and hollow aspect that those 
convicted of great crimes sometimes show ; 
nothing here of that bold and brazen front 
with which they still more frequently are 
wont to face their doom : he looks so gentle, 
so meek, so innocent, yet so calm, so self-pos- 
sessed, so dignified. It does not seem that 


BEFORE PILATE. 


95 


Pilate knew at first who this bound one was 
that now stood there before him. He must 
have heard something, perhaps much, of Je- 
sus of Nazareth before. He had been gover- 
nor of the country all through the years of 
our Lord’s public ministry, and it could 
scarcely be but that some report of his great 
sayings and doings must have reached his 
ear ; but no more, perhaps, than Herod had 
lie ever met him — ever seen him face to face ; 
nor does he yet know that this is he. He 
only knows and feels that never has his eye 
rested upon one more unlike a hardened rep- 
robate than this. His curiosity roused, his 
interest excited, the favorable impression 
which this first sight of the accused has made, 
co-operating with the instinctive and official 
sense of justice, Pilate’s first words to these 
judges and heads of the Jewish people are, 
u What accusation bring ye against this man ?” 
Was that question put in such a way, was it 
spoken in such a tone, or accompanied by such 
a look as to convey the idea that the ques- 
tioner was not at once ready to believe that 


96 


CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 


any very heinous offence had been committed 
by that man ? Perhaps it did carry with it 
some indication of that kind. But whether 
so or not, it indicated this, that Pilate meant 
to open up or re-try the case, or, at least, to 
get at and go over, upon his own account, the 
ground of their condemnation ere he ratified 
it. He could not but know — if he had not 
been distinctly told by the messengers whom 
the Jews sent to him, he saw it plainly 
enough in all the attendant circumstances — 
what it was that these Jews were expecting 
him to do. But he will do it in his own way. 
He will not sign off-hand, upon their credit 
and at their bidding, the death-warrant of a 
man like this. Had he been a judge of the 
purest and strictest honor, he would not have 
signed in such a hurried way the death-war- 
rant of any one ; but we know it from other 
sources, and the Jews who stood before him 
knew it too, that he was not such a judge, 
that he had often condemned without a hear- 
ing. And it is this which inclines us to be- 
lieve that there was something in the very 


BEFORE PILATE. 


97 


first impression that our Lord’s appearance 
made upon Pilate which touched the better 
part of his nature, and not only stirred within 
his heart the wish to know what it was of 
which they accused such a man, hut also the 
desire to ascertain, for his own satisfaction, 
whether or not that accusation was well 
founded. 

Obviously, to the men to whom it was ad- 
dressed, Pilate’s question was a disappointing 
one. They did not want, they had not ex- 
pected, to be summoned thus to adduce and 
to substantiate some charge against Jesus, 
which, in Pilate’s judgment, might be suffi- 
cient to doom him to death. They had hoped 
that to save himself the trouble of investiga- 
tion, and in compliment to them at this Pass- 
over season — a compliment which, when it 
cost him nothing, they knew that he was quite 
willing to pay — he would take their judgment 
on trust and proceed upon it. And they still 
hope so. They will let Pilate know how 
good a right they have to expect this service 
at his hand ; how much they will be offended 


98 


CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 


if he refuse it. When the question, then, is 
put to them, u What accusation bring ye 
against this man ?” they content themselves 
with saying, “ If he were not a malefactor, 
we would not have delivered him up to thee,” 
— words of haughtiness and injured pride. 

4 

“ Do you think that we, the whole assembled 
Sanhedrim ; we, the very first men in this 
Jewish community over which you happen to 
have been placed ; we, who have come to you, 
as we are not often wont to do, and are here 
before your gates to ask a very easy act of 
compliance with our will, — do you think that 
we would have brought this man to you, if 
we had not already ascertained his guilt ? 
Do you think that we would either have ven- 
tured to offer such an insult to you, or our- 
selves perpetrate such injustice ?” A very 
high tone this to take, which they have some 
hope will yet carry their point for them with 
the weak and vacillating governor. They are 
disappointed. They have stirred a pride that 
is equal to their own. If those Jews won’t 
tell him what kind or degree of criminality it 


BEFORE PILATE. 


99 


is that they attribute to this man, he, Pilate, 
won’t put himself as a blind tool into their 
hands. “ If it be your judgment, and your 
judgment alone, that is to rule this man’s case, 
6 Take ye him, then,’ said Pilate, ‘ and judge 
him according to your own law ;’ ” — a refusal 
on Pilate’s part to do the thing which they 
first hoped that they might get him to do off- 
hand ; a refusal to countersign their sentence, 
whatever it was, and by whatever evidence 
supported. It was as much as saying, that 
so far as he had yet heard or known any thing 
of this case, it was one which their own law, 
as administered by themselves, was quite 
competent to deal with. 

Let them take this man, and judge him 
and punish him as they pleased, provided 
only that they kept strictly within the limits 
that their conquerors had laid down. — This 
were wholly to miss their mark. Their tone 
changes ; their pride humbles itself. They 
are obliged to explain to the Governor, what 
he had known well enough from the first, but 
what they had not been candid enough to tell 


100 CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 


him, that it was a sentence unto death which 
they wished to get executed, a sentence 
which they were not at liberty to carry out. 
This determination of Pilate to make personal 
inquiry into the grounds of that sentence, 
obliged them also to lodge some distinct and 
specific charge against Jesus ; — one of such a 
kind that the Governor would be forced to 
deal with it ; one too of sufficient magnitude 
to draw down upon it the punishment of 
death. Now mark the deep hypocrisy and 
utter falseness of these men. It won’t do 
now to say that it was as a blasphemer, and 
as that alone, in calling himself the Son of 
God, that Jesus had been condemned before 
their bar. It won’t do to let Pilate know 
anything of that one and only piece of evi- 
dence upon which their sentence has been 
founded. What cares he about that kind of 
blasphemy of which Jesus has been convicted ; 
what cares that Roman law, of which he is 
the administrator, who or what any man 
thinks himself to be, or claims to be, in his 
relationship with God ? Let any Jew be but 


BEFORE PILATE. 


101 


a good and faithful subject to Csesar, and, so 
far as Caesar or Caesar’s representatives are 
concerned, he may claim any rank he pleases 
among the gods. It was necessary, there- 
fore, to draw the thickest veil of concealment 
over their own procedure as judges, although 
before the examination at this new bar was 
over, it oozed out that Jesus had made him- 
self the Son of God, — with what strange effect 
upon Pilate’s mind we shall presently see. 
But, in the first instance, some civil or poli- 
tical offence, some crime against the common 
law of the land, must be sought for to charge 
against Jesus. It was not easy to find or 
fabricate such a crime. Our Saviour had 
throughout most, carefully and cautiously 
avoided everything like interference or inter- 
meddling with, condemning or resisting, the 
ordinary administration of law, the policy and 
procedure of the government. He refused to 
entertain a question about the rights of in- 
heritance between two brothers, saying to 
him who sought his interference, “ Man, who 
made me a judge or a ruler over you?” 


102 


CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 


These very men, who are now about to frame 
their first accusation of him before Pilate, 
had tried to get him to pass his judgment 
upon the abstract question as to whether it 
was lawful to pay tribute to Caesar or not, 
and had failed in their attempt to entangle 
him. What concealment, then, what decep- 
tion, what effrontery of falsehood in it, — 
and it shows to what extremity they were 
driven, — that when forced to adduce some 
specific accusation, they said, “We found 
this fellow perverting the nation, and forbid- 
ding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that 
he himself is Christ a King!” They here 
bring three different accusations against him, 
not one of which — in that sense in which 
alone they desire that Pilate should under- 
stand them — they know is true ; and one of 
which, the central one of the three, they 
know is absolutely, and in every sense of 
it, false. But it suits their object to repre- 
sent the accused to Pilate as a stirrer up of 
sedition, as a refuser to pay custom, as a 
denier of the Itomai right to reign over 


BEFORE PILATE. 


103 


Judea, as a claimant to be king of the coun- 
try, in his own person and of his own right. 
These, however, were charges which they 
knew that a Roman governor, w T hose chief 
business in their country was to see that the 
rights of the Emperor whom he represented 
should suffer no damage, could not pass by ; 
charges by no means unlikely to be true, for 
Judea was at this time in a most unsettled 
state. There were multitudes of Jews who 
questioned Caesar’s right to tax them; mul- 
titudes who regarded him as a foreign usurper. 
Give them but a chance of success, and the 
great majority of the people would have risen 
then, as they rose afterwards, and risked 
their lives to regain their national liberties. 
One thing alone was suspicious — that such an 
accusation should come from such a quarter ; 
that those leaders of the Jews should be so 
very eager to get a man punished for such a 
crime. It surely could not be so mighty an 
offence in their eyes. They were not them- 
selves so very loyal to Rome as to be anxious 
to see a resister of the Roman power cut off. 


104 


CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 


Never before, at least, had they displayed 
any great zeal in that direction. Pilate had 
no faith in their sincerity. He saw through 
their designs. Perhaps it was now that, for 
the first time, he recognized that it was with 
Jesus of Nazareth, of whom he had heard 
so much, that he had to do. He did not en- 
tertain, because he did not believe, the charge 
of his being a seditious and rebellious sub- 
ject. But there was one part of the accusa- 
tion which was quite new to him, which 
sounded ridiculous in his ears, that this poor 
Nazarene should say that he was a king, the 
king of the Jews, — a very preposterous pre- 
tension ; one sufficient of itself, if there was 
any real ground for saying that it ever had 
actually been set forth, to suggest a doubt as 
to whether Jesus was a fit subject for any 
judicial procedure whatever being taken 
against him. Overlooking all else that had 
been said against him, Pilate turns to Christ, 
and says to him, “ Art thou the king of the 
Jews?” He expected nothing else than to 
get an immediate disclaimer of the absurd 


BEFORE PILATE. 


105 


pretension. To his surprise, however, Jesus 
calmly and deliberately replies, “ Thou sayest 
it, — I am the king of the Jews.” Very curious 
this, to hear such & man, in such a condition, 
and in such circumstances, speak in such a 
way. He must be some egregious, designing, 
perhaps dangerous impostor, or, more likely, 
some wretched, ignorant, half-mad enthusiast 
or fanatic. He would like to search a little 
into the matter, and find out how it really 
stood. The man himself would in all likeli- 
hood be the first to supply the clue ; he had 
so willingly and so calmly answered that first 
question that he would answer others. But 
it would be better to interrogate him alone, 
away from these accusers of his. He might 
not be so ready to answer further questions 
in their hearing, or they might interfere and 
prevent Pilate prosecuting the inquiry in his 
own way. He retires, therefore, to his own 
dwelling, into that part of it called and used 
generally as the Judgment Hall, and calls 
upon Christ to follow him. Jesus at once 
consents. He makes no scruple about cross- 

5 * 


106 CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 

ing that threshold : lie fears no contagion from 
contact with the Gentile ; his passover has 
been already held. And now, when they are 
alone, out of sight and out of hearing of those 
Jews, Pilate says again to him in a subdued 
and under-tone, as of one really anxious to 
get at the truth, u Art thou the King of the 
Jews ?” Waiving in the meantime anything 
like a direct reply , Jesus said to him, “ Sayest 
thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it 
thee of me ?” ‘ Art thou but repeating the 

words of others, or art thou asking out of the 
depths of thine own inquiring spirit? Hast 
thou too, Pilate, for that unruled, unruly 
spirit of thine, felt the inward need of some 
one to be its Governor and Lord ? Lies there 
behind the outward form and meaning of that 
question of thine, the indistinct, the inarticu- 
late longing after another king and another 
kingdom than either Jews or Homans own?’ 
Was there indeed, for one passing moment, 
far down in the depths of Pilate’s struggling 
thoughts, an element of this kind at work ; 
and did Jesus, knowing that it was there, try 


BEFORE PILATE. 


107 


thus to bring it up, that he might proceed to 
satisfy it ? If so, what a moment of tran- 
scendent interest to the Roman judge, of 
which, had he but known how to take ad- 
vantage, he too might have entered the king- 
dom, and shared its securities and blessedness. 
But he does not, he will not stoop to acknowl- 
edge, what we suspect was true, that there 
did mingle in the thoughts and feelings of 
that moment some element of the kind de- 
scribed. This is too personal, too bold, too 
home a question of the Nazarene. The pride 
of the Roman, the judge, swells up within his 
breast, and quenches the interests of the man, 
the sinner — and so he haughtily replies : a Am 
I a Jew ? Thine own nation, and the chief 
priests, have delivered thee unto me : what 
hast thou done ?” The chance of reaching 
the individual conscience of the questioner 
has passed away ; the trial has been made, 
and it has failed; Jesus must take up the 
question not as one between him and Pilate— 
between Pilate’s conscience and Pilate’s God — - 
bqt as one simply between himself as a sen- 


108 CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 

tenced criminal, and those J ews without, who 
are his accusers. He will not answer the last 
question of the Governor, 66 What hast thou 
done ?” — upon that he will not enter ; it 
would be of no avail ; but he will satisfy 
Pilate upon one point. He will convince him 
that he has committed no political offence ; 
that he never meant to set himself in opposi- 
tion to any of this world’s governments. “ My 
kingdom,” said he, “ is not of this world. If 
my kingdom were of this world, then would 
my servants fight, that I should not be deliv- 
ered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom 
not from hence a kingdom rising up among 
the others of the world, to struggle for its ex- 
istence, to establish, to protect, to extend it- 
self, by earthly weapons, by outward force of 
any kind, — not such is that kingdom which I 
Jesus call my own. 

But if not, what kind of kingdom can it 
be ? what kind of king is he who rules it ? 
So far satisfied, yet still wondering and per- 
plexed, Pilate puts his question, not in its 
first specific form, but in a more general one ? 


BEFORE PILATE. 


109 


u Art thou a king then ?” “ If not a king, 

like our own Caesars or your own Herods, if 
not a king to fight with rival sovereigns, or 
ask thy subjects to fight for thee, then in 
what sense a king ?” Our Lord’s reply, we 
can perceive, was particularly adapted to the 
position, character, acquirements, experience 
of his questioner, — a Roman official of high 
rank, educated, cultivated ; a man of affairs, 
of large experience of men — men in different 
countries and of different creeds ; not given 
much, perhaps, to any deep or serious thought 
about religious matters, yet sufficiently ac- 
quainted with the rival schools of philosophy 
and religion by which the then great living 
Roman commonwealth was divided and dis- 
tracted. Truth, moral truth, religious truth, 
w^as the one proclaimed object of research, of 
which some were saying, Lo, here it is, and 
others, Lo, there it is ; but of which he, 
Pilate, in pursuit of quite a different object, 
had learned to think that neither here nor there 
nor anywhere was it to be found. It is to 
this man that Jesus says, speaking in the 


110 


CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 


language that would be most intelligible to 
him : “ Thou sayest that I am a king. To 
this end was I born, and for this cause came 
I into the world, that I should bear witness 
unto the truth. Every one that is of the 
truth heareth my voice.” As these words 
fell upon the ear of Pilate, one can well 
enough imagine that the current of his 
thoughts ran thus : — “ It is even as I sus- 
pected ; here is another of these pretenders, 
who each would have us to believe that he 
alone had discovered the undiscoverable, that 
he alone has found out and got exclusive 
possession of the truth ; here is a new Jewish 
rival of those old Stoics of our own, who were 
ever teaching us that every wise man was a 
king, — the setter up of a new system, which 
he imagines is to dethrone every other one 
that the world before has seen, whose fancy 
is that he himself is already upon the throne 
of his great kingdom, — some poor egotistical, 
yet quite harmless enthusiast, whose day- 
dream who would wish to break ? One thing, 
at least, is clear enough, that it is a quite 


BEFORE PILATE. 


Ill 


empty, hollow charge these Jews are urging 
here against him. He may sit as long as he 
likes upon that ideal throne of his, without 
the throne of Tiberius being endangered ; he 
may get as many subjects as he can to enter 
that ideal kingdom of his, and my master, the 
Emperor, have not a loyal subject the less.” 
And so with that passing question to Jesus, 
“ What is truth ?” — a question he does not 
stay to get answered, as he has no faith that 
any answer to it can be given ; a question 
not uttered sneeringly or scoffingly, but rather 
sadly and bitterly, so far as he himself is 
concerned, having come to regard all truth as 
a phantom ; and with a kindly, tolerant, half- 
pitying, half-envious feeling towards Jesus, — 
with that question put to Jesus by the way, 
Pilate goes out to the Jews, and says to them 
boldly and emphatically, “ I find in him no 
fault at all — the faultlessness of Christ ac- 
knowledged, his kingly claims scarcely com- 
prehended, and so far as comprehended, re- 
jected, perhaps despised. 

Let each of us now ask himself, How 


112 CHRIST’S FIRST APPEARANCE 

stands it as to me and this kingdom of the 
truth, this one great King of the true ? Is 
Jesus Christ to me the way, the truth, the 
life ? Does truth, simple, pure, eternal truth, 
stand expressed and exhibited to me in those 
words, those prayers, those acts, those suffer- 
ings, that life, that death, of Jesus Christ? 
The witness that he bore to the truth, in the 
living of that life and the dying of that death, 
— have I listened to it, and believed in it, 
and submitted to it ? Am I of the truth ; a 
simple, humble, earnest seeker after it ; and 
have I this evidence of my being so, that I 
hear the voice of Jesus, hear it and hail it, 
among all the conflicting voices that are fall- 
ing on my ear, as the voice of him who right- 
fully claims the lordship of my soul? Is 
truth — the truth as to God, my Creator, my 
Father, my Redeemer ; the truth as to my- 
self, what I am, what I ought to be, what I 
may be, what I shall be, — is this truth not a 
mere form of sound words, not a mere con- 
geries of acknowledged or accepted proposi- 
tions ; but does it stand before me embodied 


BEFORE PILATE. 


113 


in the person, the life, the death, the medita- 
tion of Jesns Christ; and have I enshrined 
and enthroned him as King and Lord of my 
weak, my sinful, my immortal spirit ? 


Y. 


(Clmst’.s SViiimvrantt kfow 

Jesus had spoken quite frankly and openly 
to Pilate when they were together, out of 
sight and hearing of the Jews, alone in the 
Judgment Hall. It was quite different when, 
accompanied by Christ, Pilate came out again 
to the attendant crowd, and boldly said to 

them, “ I find no fault in this man.” So far, 

then, the Chief Priests and Elders have failed. 
Failure always embitters. Failure here was 
what these men were by no means disposed 
to submit to. Pilate’s assertion of his belief 
in the innocence of Jesus only made them the 
more vehement in their assertion of his crim- 
inality. They became the more fierce. They 

* Matt, xxvii. 12, 13; Mark vi. 14-16; Luke ix. 7-9; xiii. 31, 
32: xxiil 4-12. 


APPEARANCE BEFORE HEROD. 115 


accused him, Mark tell us, of many things. 
But the waves and the billows of this swell- 
ing wrath of theirs broke harmlessly upon 
Christ. So absent, so unmoved, so indiffer- 
ent did he appear, that it seemed as if he had 
not heard what they were saying against him, 
or hearing had not understood, or understand- 
ing had not heeded. Very different his re- 
tirement into himself, — this unruffled com- 
posure, this unbroken silence, from those 
eager and animated utterances to which the 
Governor had just been listening in the hall 
within. Perhaps it is wounded pride that 
seals the lips of Jesus. To men like these, 
animated by such a bitter personal hostility 
to him, exhausting every epithet of vitupera- 
tion, heaping upon him all kinds of charges, 
Jesus may not choose to condescend to give 
any answer. But he has not treated, will 
not treat, the Boman governor in the same 
way ; at least will surely tell him why it is 
that he preserves this silence. Pilate says to 
him, “ Hearest thou not how many things they 
witness against thee ?” There is no reply. 


116 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


The lips are as shut at the question of Pilate 
as at the accusation of the Jews. Christ has 
said all that he meant to say, done all that 
he meant to do, so far as those charges were 
concerned that they were now bringing 
against him. He had answered to the 
Homan judge that the kingship which he 
claimed was not of a kind in any way to 
interfere with this world’s governments ; he 
had satisfied him of his perfect innocuous- 
ness as a subject of the State ; and, having 
done that, he would say and do no more. 

One observes an almost exact parallel as to 
his silences and his speakings in our Lord’s 
conduct before the Jewish and the Gentile 
courts of justice. In that preliminary unoffi- 
cial conversation he held with Annas before 
the Sanhedrim sat in judgment on his case, 
Jesus had spoken without reserve, had an- 
swered the High Priest’s questions but too 
fully, and had brought down upon himself 
the stroke of the officer who stood by. But 
when the regular trial commenced, and 
charges were formally brought forward, and 


BEFORE HEROD. 


117 


attempted by many witnesses to be substan- 
tiated, Jesus held his peace, so long and so 
resolutely, manifesting so little disposition or 
desire to medde in any way with the pro- 
cedure that was going on, that the High 
Priest rose from his seat in the midst, and 
put to him a question of the same import 
with that which Pilate afterwards put ; and 
the two questions met with the very same 
treatment, — to neither of them a single word 
of reply was given. But when the High 
Priest rose, and solemnly adjured Jesus to 
tell whether he was the Christ the Son of 
God, just as when Pilate asked whether he 
was the King of the Jews, and what kind 
of king he was, our Lord made instant and 
distinct and unambiguous reply. So far as 
we can see or understand the principle ruling 
here the Saviour’s conduct, determining the 
time to speak and the time to be silent, it 
was this : that when the matter immediately 
and directly concerns his Divine Sonship and 
Kingship, he will help his judges in every 
way he can ; nay, he will himself supply the 


118 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


evidence they want. Upon that count he 
will allow himself to he condemned ; he will 
co-operate with his enemies in the bringing 
about of his condemnation ; but of all these 
other lesser trifling charges he will take no 
account ; but leave all their manifold attempts 
to fasten on him any other kind of charge, to 
break down of themselves, that, his enemies 
themselves being witnesses, it might be solely 
and alone as the Son of God, the King of 
Israel, that he should be convicted, con- 
demned, and crucified. 

Among the many things that the Chief 
Priests were now accusing Jesus of in the 
presence of the Governor, hoping still to 
convince Pilate that he was not the guiltless 
man that he had taken him to be, there was 
one thing that they put prominently forward, 
presented in every form, amplified in every 
way, on which they mainly relied in their 
dealings with Pilate, — the setting forth of 
Christ as a ringleader of sedition. “ He stir- 
reth up the people,” stirreth them up against 
the constituted authorities, preaching rebel- 


BEFORE HEROD. 


119 


lion through the whole country, not here in 
Judea alone, but there also in Galilee where 
he began this work. This allusion to Galilee 
as the birthplace of the alleged seditious 
movement may have been accidental ; they 
may have meant merely thereby to signify 
how widespread the evil had been which 
they were calling upon Pilate to check ; or it 
may have been done designedly, with that art 
which was to leave nothing unsaid or unsug- 
gested, by which the Governor could possibly 
be influenced. Galilee might have been 
named by them, to suggest to Pilate how dif- 
ficult it was to produce proof of crime com- 
mitted in so remote a district ; or to remind 
him that this Galilee, upon which so much of 
Christ’s time and labor had been spent, was 
the chosen haunt of the resisters of the 
Homan authority, the cradle of most of the 
seditious plots concocted against the Emper- 
or’s government ; or they might have known 
of the bad feeling that there was at this 
time between Pilate and the King of Galilee, 
and might have imagined that it would be 


120 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


rather gratifying to Pilate than otherwise to 
lay his hand judicially upon one who might 
be regarded as a subject of that prince. 

However it was, no sooner had the words 
escaped their lips, than a happy thought sug- 
gests itself to Pilate. He is in great diffi- 
culty with this case ; he knows not how to 
deal with it. He had never been so impor- 
tuned as he now was by those Chief Priests 
and elders ; he never saw them more bent on 
anything than on the death of this man whom 
they have brought to him ; it would be easy 
to give him up to their vengeance — he had 
done as much as that before; — but he was 
convinced of this man’s innocence ; there was 
something too, so peculiar about his whole 
look, bearing, and conduct, that he could not 
make up his mind to have any share in send- 
ing him to be executed as a common criminal. 
But now he hears, that part at least, perhaps, 
the greater part of the offence that these were 
alleging he had committed, had taken place 
in Galilee, in that part of the country which 
was not under his jurisdiction, but belonged 


BEFORE HEROD. 


121 


to that of Herod. This Herod, the King of 
Galilee, happened at this very time to he in 
Jerusalem. Pilate will send the case to him; 
and thus get the responsibility of deciding it 
shifted from his own shoulders, by laying it 
upon one who not only may be quite willing 
to assume it, but may regard as a compliment 
the reference of the case to his adjudication. 
There was a misunderstanding between the 
two — the Homan Procurator and the Galilean 
king — which the sending of Jesus to the 
latter for trial might serve to heal. Pilate 
had done something to displease Herod, — 
something, in all likelihood, in the very way 
of interfering with what Herod regarded as 
his rights, and the rights of his subjects. 
Some Galileans had been up lately at Jeru- 
salem, offering sacrifice there. There had 
been a riot, which Pilate had promptly and 
summarily quelled ; but in doing so he had 
mingled the blood of some of these Galileans 
with their sacrifices — cut them down without 
inquiring whose subjects they were, or what 

right they might have to demand a trial in 
6 


122 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


one or other of the Herodian courts. For 
this, or such-like imagined interference with 
his jurisdiction, Herod had taken offence at 
Pilate. It would be, then, the very kind of 
compliment most soothing to his kingly van- 
ity, this recognition of his jurisdiction, by 
sending to him so notorious a person as Jesus 
w T as, to be tried at his bar. Herod recognised 
and appreciated the compliment ; and what- 
ever else Pilate lost by the line of conduct he 
pursued that day, he at least gained this, — • 
he got that quarrel between him and Herod 
healed. 

The happy thought no sooner occurs to 
Pilate than he acts upon it. And now, guard- 
ed by some Homan soldiers, accompanied by 
the whole crowd of his accusers, Jesus is de- 
spatched to Herod. To enter into the scene 
that follows, we must go back a little upon 
this Herod’s history. How John the Baptist 
and he became first acquainted, we are not 
told. A part of the territory (Persea) over 
which Herod’s jurisdiction extended, ran 
down along the eastern shore of the Dead 


BEFORE HEROD. 


123 


Sea, and it is probable that it was in some of 
the circuits that he made of this district that 
he first fell in with the Baptist, engaged in his 
great ministry of repentance. Herod was 
greatly struck alike with the man and with 
his teaching. There was a strange fascination 
about both which drew the attention of the 
King. As there was nothing about John’s 
ministry to excite or gratify either the intel- 
lect or the fancy, — no miracles wrought, no 
new doctrines propounded, no vivid picturing 
employed ; as all was so purely moral, so 
plain, so pointed, so practical in his teaching, 
we must believe that what at first drew Herod 
to John, and made him listen with such pleas- 
ure, was that it was a faithful portraiture of 
men that John was drawing, an honest and 
fearless exposure of their sins that he made. 
Herod both admired and approved ; but the 
pleasure that he had in observing John, and 
in listening to his instruction, was by no 
means a pure or untroubled one. He feared 
John, we are told, knowing that he was a just 
man and a holy. This fear was the fruit of 


124 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


guilt. He knew and felt what a different man 
John was from himself. The very presence 
of the Baptist was a rebuke, and he was not 
yet so hardened as to receive that rebuke 
without alarm. Nor did this first connexion 
of the King with the Baptist terminate in the 
mere excitement of certain emotions, whether 
of respect, or admiration, or fear. Herod did 
many things, we are told, at John’s bidding. 
I imagine that, in the first stage of their in- 
tercourse, John dealt with Herod as he dealt 
with the Pharisees, and the soldiers, and the 
publicans ; that he laid his hand upon those 
open and patent offences which as a ruler, and 
in common with others holding that office, 
Herod notoriously was guilty of. The King 
not only suffered him to do so, but even went 
the length of reforming his conduct in some 
respects, in obedience to the Baptist’s instruc- 
tions. But John did not stop there — did not 
stop where Herod would have liked ; but, 
stepping boldly into the inner circle of his 
private life, and laying his hand upon the 
stain which disfigured it, he said to him, “ It 


BEFORE HEROD. 


125 


is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s 
wife." 

In all likelihood Herodias was not with 
Herod when first he met the Baptist, and 
heard him so gladly, and did many things at 
his bidding. This meeting may have hap- 
pened in the wilderness, where Herod ranked 
but as one of John’s large and public au- 
dience. But the King invited the Baptist 
to his court, and it was there, perhaps in pres- 
ence of Herodias, that the rebuke of that 
particular transgression was given. Herod’s 
anger was kindled at what appeared an im- 
pertinent and officious intermeddling with his 
private conduct, his family affairs. And there 
was one beside him who resented that inter- 
meddling still more than he, and was at pains 
to excite and to nurse his wrath. Herodias 
would have made short work of it with this 
sharp reprover ; she would have sealed those 
lips of his at once in death, so that she should 
no more be troubled with their unwelcome 
utterances ; and Herod would have yielded to 
her desire, notwithstanding all his earlier 


126 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


readiness to hear and to obey, notwithstand- 
ing all his respect and regard for John; but 
he feared the multitude, and, yielding to that 
fear, he made a compromise — he cast John 
into prison, and kept him there for months. 
But months could not quench the thirst for 
his blood that had been stirred in the heart 
of that second J ezebel ; still she was asking 
for the head of the Baptist, but Herod would 
not yield, — took no little credit to himself, 
we may believe, for being so firm, and, for- 
getting that it was the fear of the multitude 
that overbalanced the influence of the Queen, 
might have come to persuade himself that he 
was dealing very gently and tenderly with the 
Baptist. But the Queen knew him better 
than he knew himself, and so with diabolic 
art contrived the plot that was to bring an- 
other and still weightier fear, to overbalance 
in its turn that fear of the multitude. 

All went as she desired. The evening for 
the royal supper came ; the chief men of 
Galilee, with the king in high good-humor at 
their head, sat down at the banqueting- table. 


BEFORE HEROD. 


127 


Salome entered, and danced before them ; the 
guests, heated with wine, broke out into rap- 
turous applause. In a transport of delight, 
the King made the fatal promise, and con- 
firmed it with an oath, that he would give her 
whatsoever she should ask. Salome went 
out to consult her mother as to what her re- 
quest should be. There was little time spent 
in deliberation. The Queen’s reply was all 
ready, for she had conjectured what would 
occur, and so Mark tells, Salome came in 
straightway unto the King, and said, Give 
me here John the Baptist’s head upon a 
charger. The King was taken in the snare ; 
no time for thought was given, no way of es- 
cape left open. There was the oath which he 
had taken ; there were the witnesses of that 
oath around the board. He could not break 
his oath without standing dishonored before 
those witnesses. The fear of the multitude 
is overborne by a still higher fear. He gives 
the order, and the deed is done. Unhappy 
man ! entangled, betrayed by his own rash 
vow ; his very sense of honor turned into the 


128 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


instrument that makes of him a murderer ! 
Herod was exceeding sorry ; he knew well 
how wrong a thing it was that he was doing ; 
it was with hitter self-reproach that the order 
for the execution was given. For a short 
time there were the stings of remorse, hut 
these soon lost their power. John was be- 
headed, and no manifestation of popular dis- 
pleasure made. John was beheaded ; Hero- 
dias and Salome were satisfied, and Herod 
himself could not but acknowledge that there 
was a kind of relief in knowing that he should 
he troubled by her no more about him. Re- 
morse died out, hut a strange kind of super- 
stitious fear haunted Herod’s spirit. Reports 
are brought to him of another strange teacher 
who has arisen, and to whom all men are now 
flocking, as they had flocked to the Baptist at 
the first. And Herod says, “ John have I 
beheaded, but who is this of whom I hear 
such things ?” 

What perplexed him was, that it was said 
by some that John was risen from the dead, 
by some that Elias had appeared, by others 


BEFORE HEROD. 


129 


that one of the old prophets had arisen. 
Herod hesitated for a time which of these 
suppositions he should adopt; hut at last he 
adopted one of them, and said to his servants, 
“ This is John the Baptist; he is risen from 
the dead, and therefore mighty works do show 
forth themselves in him.” He desired to see 
him; a desire in which there mingled at the 
first so much of awe and dread, that he rather 
shunned than courted an interview ; so much 
so, that when Christ came afterwards into 
Galilee, and there was some prospect they 
might meet, he had in a very artful way, by 
working on Christ’s fears, persuaded him to 
withdraw from that part of the country. He 
sent some Pharisees, who said to Jesus, “ Get 
thee out, and depart hence, for Herod will 
kill thee.” Herod never could have really 
meditated such a deed. We know that after- 
wards when it was in his power, he declined 
taking any part in the condemnation and cru- 
cifixion of Jesus. It was but a cunning de- 
vice intended to get Herod out of the embar- 
rassments in which he found that Christ’s 


130 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


residence and teaching in the territory within 
his jurisdiction might involve him. And so 
Jesus seems to have dealt with it, when he 
said to the Pharisees, whom he at once re- 
cognized as the agents of the King : “ Go,” 
said he, “ and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out 
devils, and I do cures to-day and to-morrow, 
and the third day I shall be perfected,” — ‘ my 
times and places for working and for finishing 
my work, are all definitely arranged, and that 
quite independently of any stratagem of this 
cunning king/ 

At last, at an unexpected time and place, 
and in an unexpected way, J esus is presented 
to him; presented by Pilate; presented to be 
tried ; presented as a criminal at the bar, 
with whom he may use the greatest freedom, 
as Jesus will surely be anxious to say and do 
all he can in order to obtain his release. 
Herod, therefore, when he sees Jesus thus 
placed before him, is exceedingly glad, — he 
had heard so much about him, had desired so 
long to see him. But now, as indicating at 
once the state of mind and heart into which 


BEFORE HEROD. 


131 


worldliness indulged, and levity and licen- 
tiousness, have sunk this man, and as supply- 
ing to us the key that explains our Lord’s 
singular conduct to him, let us particularly 
notice, that in the gladness which Herod feels 
in having the desire to see Christ thus grati- 
fied, there mingles no wish to be instructed, 
no alarm of a guilty conscience, no dread of 
meeting another Baptist to rebuke him for his 
iniquities. He has got over whatever com- 
punction he may at one time have felt. He 
has quenched those risings of remorse within 
his heart. He has come to be once more on 
such good terms with himself; so much at 
ease, that when he looks at Jesus, it is with 
no disturbing remembrances of that bloody 
head once brought to him upon the charger, — 
no shrinking dread that he may see again the 
Baptist’s form, and hear again the Baptist’s 
voice. It is with an eager, idle, prurient 
curiosity — having a tinge, perhaps, of super- 
stitious wonder in it, that he looks upon Je- 
sus, and proceeds to put his questions to him. 
As compared with J ohn, this new teacher had 


132 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


been distinguished by the miracles which he 
had wrought. And if he wrought miracles 
to save others, surely he will work some to 
save himself. Herod tries in every way he 
can think of, to induce him to work some 
wonder in his presence. How does Jesus act 
when addressed and treated thus by such a 
man ? Shall it be as if the Baptist had in- 
deed risen from the dead ? Will Jesus seize 
upon the opportunity now given, to take up, 
reiterate, and redouble upon the profligate 
prince the rebuke of his great forerunner? 
Shall Herod hear it said to him now, in tones 
more piercing than ever John employed, It 
was not lawful for thee to take the Baptist’s 
life ? Not thus does Jesus act. Herod puts 
question after question to him. Jesus looks 
at the questioner, but opens not his lips. 
Herod asks and asks again, that some sign 
may be shown by Jesus, some token of his 
alleged power exhibited. Jesus never lifts a 
finger, nor makes a single movement, in com- 
pliance. Herod is the only one of all his 
judges whom Jesus deals with in this way, — 


BEFORE HEROD. 


133 


the only one of them before whom, however 
spoken to, he preserves a continnons and un- 
broken silence. It does not appear that, from 
the time when he was presented to Herod, to 
the time when he was sent away from him, a 
single word ever passed the Saviour’s lips. 

That deep and death-like silence, the 
silence of those lips which opened with such 
pliant readiness when any w T ord of gentle 
entreaty or hopeful warning was to be spoken, 
how shall we interpret it ? Was it indigna- 
tion that sealed those lips? Would Christ 
hold no intercourse wdth the man who had 
dipped his hands in such blood as that of the 
Baptist ? Did he mean to mark off Herod 
as the one and only man so deeply stained 
with guilt that he will not stoop to exchange 
with him a single word ? It had been human 
this, but not divine ; and it is a divine meaning 
that we must look for in this dread and aw- 
ful silence. There lived not, there breathed 
not upon the earth the man, however 
steeped in guilt, from whom that loving Sav- 
iour would have turned away, had but the 


134 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


slightest sign of penitence been shown, the 
slightest symptom of a readiness to listen and 
be saved. It was no bygone act of Herod’s 
life that drew down upon him the doom of 
that silence — though doom it little seemed to 
him to be ; it was the temper and the spirit 
of the man as he stood there before the Lord, 
after all that he had passed through ; it was 
that which did it. Why, the very sight of 
Jesus, cpnnected, as he knew or fancied him, 
in some mysterious way with John, should 
have been to Herod as though one risen from 
the dead had actually appeared in his pres- 
ence. It should have been he, not Jesus, 
that should have been speechless when they 
met; or, if he spake at all, it should have 
been to ask whether, in that world of spirits 
from which Christ came, there was mercy for 
a sinner such as he. But, instead of this, 
instead of anything like this, instead of deep 
or earnest or anxious feeling of any kind, 
there is nothing but a vain-glorious wish to 
have his kingly pride gratified by some talk 
with this strange man, with whose name and 


BEFORE HEROD. 


135 


fame all the country has been ringing, the 
babblings of an empty curiosity, the thirst for 
some showy exhibition of knowledge or of 
power. Let not that man think that he shall 
hear anything of the Lord. Christ could have 
spoken such a word as Herod never would 
have liked to hear again ; he could have 
wrought such a miracle as would have turned 
the curiosity of the king into terror, his pride 
into abasement. But he is now to reap the 
fruit of his own doings, and that fruit is even 
this, that he is left unspoken to by the Lord 
from heaven. This silence, had he but inter- 
preted it aright, was perhaps the very instru- 
ment most fitted to speak home to his con- 
science and his heart. But he did not 
understand it, did not enter into the reason 
of it, never thought of his own past con- 
duct, his own present character, as the cause 
of it; it stirred him to no inquiry, it 
awakened in him no remorse. The only 
feeling that it appears to have produced 
was irritation; the irritation of mortified 
vanity. Greatly galled, yet in no way soft- 


136 


CHRIST’S APPEARANCE 


ened, when he could make nothing of this 
mysterious man who mantled himself in such 
obstinate silence, he and his men of war found 
nothing else to do than to set Christ at 
naught, and mock him, and array him in a 
white robe, and send him back to Pilate. 

A wonderful instance this of the onward, 
downward course of crime, particularly of that 
peculiar course of crime, levity, and licen- 
tiousness, which Herod had pursued ; an in- 
stance how speedily and how thoroughly a 
human heart may harden itself against re- 
proof, quench its convictions, get over its 
fears, and bring down upon itself that doom, 
than which there is none more awful, — 
Ephraim is joined to his idols ; let him alone. 
To be left utterly and absolutely alone ; to 
have all the voices that speak to us of God 
and duty, the voice of conscience from within, 
the voice of providence from without, the 
voice which comes from the lips of Jesus, — 
to have all these voices hushed, hushed into 
an unbroken, perhaps eternal stillness ; can 
one conceive any condition of a human spirit 


BEFORE HEROD. 


137 


sadder or more awful ? Yet this is the very 
condition to which the abuse of opportunity, 
the indulgence of passion, the drowning of 
the voices when they do speak to us, is natu- 
rally and continually tending. 

My young friends let me entreat you es- 
pecially to take a double warning from such 
a case as this : — 1st. Beware how you deal 
with your first religious convictions ; tremble 
for yourselves if you find them dying by a 
slow death, as the withering, hardening spirit 
of worldliness creeps in upon your soul, or 
perishing suddenly amid the consuming fires 
of some burning passion. They tell us that 
there is no ice so close and hard as that 
which forms upon the surface which once was 
thawed; and there is no hardness of the 
human spirit so great as that which forms 
over hearts that once had melted. And, 2d, 
Beware of hot fits of enthusiasm, in which 
you go farther in profession than you are 
prepared to go in steady and sustained prac- 
tice. ITerod went too far at first, and got 
himself involved among obligations and re- 


138 


CHRIST BEFORE HEROD. 


straints from which, when the hour of temp- 
fcation came, he flung himself free by an effort 
which damaged his moral and spiritual nature 
more than it had been ever damaged before ; 
his revulsions from religion all the greater on 
account of the temporary and partial, but 
hollow and merely emotional entertainment 
that he had given to its claims. What you 
do, do it with all your heart ; for it is good to 
be zealously affected in a good thing ; but do 
it intelligently, calmly, deliberately, as those 
who know and feel that it is the greatest of 
all transactions that you engage in, when it 
is with God and for your soul’s eternal wel- 
fare that you transact. 


VI. 

(Shvi»t f » Mm -gilat* * 

“ This child,” said good old Simeon, as he 
took up the infant Jesus into his arms to 
bless him — “ this child is set for the fall and 
rising again of many in Israel; and for a 
sign that shall he spoken against; that the 
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” 
Never were those words more strikingly ful- 
filled than in these closing scenes of the 
Saviour’s life which we are now engaged in 
tracing. Then many fell, — those forsaking, 
despairing disciples of J esus, — but fell to rise 
again; then was that sign set up, against 
which so many shafts of so many kinds were 
launched; and then were the thoughts of 


e Luke xxiii. 13-16 ; Matthew xxyil 15-23 ; Luke xxiii. 20-23 ; 
Matthew xxvii. 26-30; John xix. 1-16. 


140 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 


many hearts revealed — among others those 
of Judas, and Peter, and Caiaphas, and 
Herod, and Pilate — revealed by the very 
closeness of their contact with Christ, by the 
peculiarity of those relationships to him into 
which they were then thrown. Last Sunday 
our attention was concentrated upon Herod ; 
to-day let us fix our eyes on Pilate, and, 
taking him up at that stage where we left 
him, let us try to understand and to follow 
the working of his thoughts and feelings 
during those two hours of their earthly lives 
in which he and Jesus had to do with one 
another — he in the character of the judge, 
Jesus in the character of one accused and 
condemned by the Sanhedrim. 

You will remember that when first he 
heard among the other accusations that the 
High Priests lodged against him, that Jesus 
had said that he himself was Christ a King, — 
struck at once with the singularity of the pre- 
tension, and with the appearance of the man 
who made it, Pilate called on Christ to follow 
him into the inner hall of his residence ; that 


BEFORE PILATE. 


141 


there, when alone with him, omitting all refer- 
ence to any other charge, he asked him par- 
ticularly about this one; that Christ fully 
satisfied him as to there being nothing politi- 
cally dangerous or offensive in the claim to 
kingship he had put forth ; that, bringing 
Christ out along with him to the Jews, he 
said at once and decidedly, “ I find no fault 
in this man;” and that then, taking advan- 
tage of a reference to Galilee, he had sent 
Jesus off to Herod, to see what that Galilean 
king and judge might think and do. In this 
way he hoped to be relieved from the painful 
and embarrassing position in which he felt 
himself to be placed. 

lie was disappointed in this hope. Jesus 
was sent back to him by Herod ; sent back 
without any judgment having been pro- 
nounced ; sent back in such a way as to in- 
dicate that Herod as well as he made light of 
this poor Galilean’s pretension to be a king, — 
thought it, in fact, more a matter for mockery 
and ridicule than for serious judicial enter- 
tainment. Although a considerable body of 


142 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

the High Priests and of the people had ac- 
companied Jesus to and from the bar of 
Herod, yet in that interval there had been to 
some extent a scattering of the crowd. Pilate 
called, therefore, now afresh together the 
Chief Priests, and the rulers, and the people 
— the latter particularly mentioned, as Pilate 
had now begun to think that his best chance 
of gaining the end upon which his heart was 
set,— the deliverance of Christ out of the 
hands of his enemies, — would be by appeal- 
ing, over the heads of their rulers, to the hu- 
manity of the common people. When all, 
then, were again assembled, he made a short 
speech to them, reiterating his own conviction 
of Christ’s innocence, confirming it by the 
testimony of Herod, and closing by a pro- 
posal that he hoped would be at once accept- 
ed, — I will therefore chastise him. and release 
him. But why, if he were innocent, chastise 
him at all ? Why not at once acquit the cul- 
prit, and send him away absolved from the 
bar of Homan judgment ? It was a weak 
and unworthy concession, the first faltering 


BEFORE PILATE. 


143 


of Pilate s footstep. He cannot but say that 
he has found nothing worthy of death in this 
man ; he is himself thoroughly satisfied that 
there is nothing worthy of any punishment 
in him ; but it will please his accusers, it will 
conciliate the people, it may open the way to 
their readier acquiescence in his after dis- 
missal, to inflict some punishment upon him ; 
a proposal not dictated by any spirit of 
cruelty, springing rather from the wish to 
protect Jesus from the greater penalty, by 
inflicting on him the less ; yet one that 
weakened his position, that made those 
sharp-sighted Jews at once perceive that he 
could be moved, that he was not ready to 
take up and stand firmly and fixedly upon 
the ground of Christ’s innocence. In defer- 
ence to them, he has gone so far against his 
own convictions ; he may go farther. He 
has yielded the inch, they may force him to 
yield the ell. The proposal, therefore, of 
chastising Jesus, and letting him go, is re- 
jected, and rejected so as to throw Pilate 
back upon some other, some new device. 


144 Christ’s second appearance 

He recollected that at this time of the 
Passover it was a customary thing, in com- 
pliment to the great assembly of the Jews 
in their metropolis, for the Procurator to ar- 
rest in a single instance the ordinary course 
of justice, and to release whatever prisoner 
the people might ask to be given up. He 
recollected at the same time that there was 
a notable prisoner, w T ho then lay bound at 
Jerusalem, one Barabbas, who for sedition 
and murder had been cast into prison ; and 
the idea occurred to Pilate that if, instead 
either of asking them broadly and generally 
who it was that they wished him to release, 
or whether they would let him choose for 
them and release Jesus, — if he narrowed in 
this instance the choice, and presented to 
them the alternative of taking Barabbas or 
Jesus, they could scarcely fail to choose the 
latter. To give the greater effect to this 
proposition, Pilate ascended the movable ros- 
trum or judgment-seat, which stood upon the 
tessalated pavement that ran before the ves- 
tibule of the Palace, and addressing himself 


BEFORE PILATE. 


145 


to the multitude, said to them, “ Whom will 
ye that I release unto you ? Barabbas, or 
Jesus who is called Christ ?” 

While waiting their answer, a message was 
brought to him, the messenger having been 
instructed to deliver it immediately, wherever 
he was, and however he might be engaged. 
It came from his wife ; was distinct and some- 
what authoritative, — “ Have thou nothing to 
do with that just man, for I have suffered 
many things this day in a dream because of 
him.” Pilate’s wife was not a Jew, nor did 
she mix much with the common people of the 
land. That she should have heard so much 
of Jesus, have learned to think and speak of 
him as that just man, should have been so 
much concerned when she heard that her hus- 
band had been asked to try him, that she took 
this uncommon step of sending a warning to 
him on the judgment-seat, — may be taken as 
a proof how wide-spread and how deep the 
impression was that Christ had made. 

The time occupied by the hearing and 

thinking about this message, — whose warning 
7 


146 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

knell rung in strange harmony with the alarm 
that was already pealing in Pilate’s spirit, — 
gave to the Chief Priests and the rulers the 
opportunity they were so quick to seize, to 
prompt the crowd as to the answer they were 
to give to the proposal which Pilate had sub- 
mitted. We do not know what kind of stimu- 
lants were employed upon this occasion ; but 
we all do know what a flexible, impressible, 
excitable a thing a city mob is, when com- 
posed, as this one mainly was, of the lowest 
of the people ; and we can at least easily 
conjecture what the firebrands were which 
the expert hands of the priesthood threw in 
among that mob, inflaming its passions to the 
highest pitch, and giving the burning mass 
into their hands, to be directed as they de- 
sired. Recovered a little from the disturb- 
ance which his wife’s message cost him, Pilate 
turns again to the people, and says to them, 
“ Which of the two, then, will ye that I re- 
lease unto you ?” They say, “ Barabbas.” 
Surprised and annoyed at the reply, almost 
willing to believe there has been some mis- 


BEFORE PILATE. 


147 


take, he puts it to them in another form : 
“ Will ye that I release unto you the King of 
the Jews ?” using the epithet, in the belief 
that they, as well as he, will look upon its 
claimant more as an object of pity than of 
condemnation. But now they leave him in 
no doubt as to what their will and pleasure 
is : “ Away with this man,” they all cry out 
at once, “ and release unto us Barabbas !” 
“ What shall I then do with Jesus, which is 
called Christ ?” This weak and almost pitiful 
asking of them what it was that he should 
do, ends, as all such yielding to popular pre- 
judices, cringing to popular passions, ever 
does ; it makes the multitude more confident, 
more imperious. The Governor has put him- 
self into their hands, and they will make him 
do their will. “ What shall I do, then, with 
Jesus ?” Let him be crucified, they say. 
Crucified ! It is the first time the word has 
been named in Pilate’s hearing, the first time 
they tell him articulately what it is they de- 
sire to have done with Jesus. Crucify him ! 
— give up to that worst and most ignominious 


148 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

of all deaths this meek and gentle man, who 
he is sure has done no wrong ; whom he sees 
well enough that the Chief Priests seek to get 
rid of from some religious antipathy that they 
have taken against him : — can the people 
mean it ? He had fancied, whatever the 
Chief Priests thought, that they had a differ- 
ent feeling towards him. “ Why,” in his sur- 
prise, he says to them, “ what evil hath he 
done ?” But this now excited and uproarious 
crowd is far past the point of answering or 
arguing with the Governor. Its one and only 
cry is, “ Let him be crucified !” Twice Pilate 
asks them to tell him what crime he had com- 
mitted, that they should doom him to a felon’s 
death. He gets but that cry repeated, with 
louder, angrier voice. Yet a third time, — 
clinging to the hope that he may still suc- 
ceed in extricating Jesus from their grasp, 
without putting himself entirely wrong with 
them, — he puts the query, — “ Why, what evil 
hath he done ?” and gathering up a little 
strength, as if he were determined to take 
his own way, and act upon the suggestion 


BEFORE PILATE. 


149 


that he had thrown out a few moments before, 
he adds, “ I have found no cause of death in 
him. I will therefore chastise him, and let 
him go.” The very mention of letting him 
go stirs the crowd to a tenfold frenzy, and 
now the voices of the Chief Priests them- 
selves are heard swelling and intensifying the 
cry, “ Crucify him ! crucify him !” 

Before a storm like this who can stand ? 
He has done — so Pilate thinks — the most he 
can. If he go further, he will raise another 
city tumult which it will cost many lives to 
quell, and the quelling of which by force may 
expose him to the very same charges of 
tyranny and cruelty which, upon more than 
one occasion of the kind before, had actually 
been transmitted to Home against him, and 
drawn down upon him the rebuke and dis- 
pleasure of the Emperor. The yielding is but 
the sacrifice of a single life, which may be 
made without involving the Governor in any 
danger. But the resisting ; who can tell in 
what that might land ? Still, however, he is 
not at ease. He himself scarce knows the 


150 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

reason why ; but somehow he never saw the 
man whose blood he would like so ill to have 
resting upon him as the blood of Jesus. The 
private interview they had together in the 
Hall had raised some strange misgivings in 
Pilate’s heart. What is it about this man 
that has given him so strong a hold upon 
Pilate, and makes him struggle so hard to get 
him released ? Pilate himself could not have 
told ; but even now, though he has at last 
resolved to give him up, he will not, cannot 
do it without trying in some way to throw off 
his shoulders the responsibility of his death. 
“When Pilate saw that he could prevail 
nothing, but rather that a tumult was made, 
he took water and washed his hands before 
the multitude, saying, 6 1 am innocent of the 
blood of this just person ; see ye to it.’ Then 
answered all the people and said, ‘ His blood 
be on us, and on our children.’ And he de- 
livered Jesus to their will.” 

Now, let us pause a moment here in the 
narrative to mark the inner workings of con- 
science and of humanity in the heart of Pilate. 


BEFORE PILATE. 


151 


It seemed an ingenious device to give the 
people their choice. It was resorted to from 
a desire on his part to rescue Jesus. It would 
gain, as it first seemed to him, a double ob- 
ject, — it would prevent the Jews from saying 
that he had screened a seditious man, and yet 
it would rescue an innocent one froip. death. 
But to what did it amount ? It proceeded on 
the assumption that Christ was guilty; it 
asked that as one righteously condemned, he 
might by an act of grace be released. There 
lay one fatal flaw in the proposition. But, 
still worse, it put the matter out of Pilate’s 
hands into those of the people. It was a 
virtual renunciation, on Pilate’s part, of the 
rights and prerogatives of the judge. And 
by thus denuding himself of his own proper 
official position, Pilate put himself at the 
mercy of a fickle and infuriated populace, and 
gave them that hold and power over him 
which they so mercilessly employed. 

This crying out — “ Crucify, crucify him !” 
as contrasted with the hosannas that a few 
days before had greeted Christ’s entrance into 


152 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 


Jerusalem, has been often quoted to prove 
how rapid the changes in popular sentiment 
sometimes are, how little a multitude can be 
trusted. But was it the same crowd which 
raised the hosannas of the one day, that ut- 
tered the “ Crucify him, crucify him !” of the 
other ? I rather think that had we been 
present upon both occasions, and intimately 
acquainted with the inhabitants of J erusalem, 
we should have seen that the two crowds 
were differently constituted; and that how- 
ever true it may be that tides of public feel- 
ing often take suddenly opposite directions, 
this can scarcely be quoted as an instance 
exactly in point. 

But very curious is it to mark the expe- 
dient to which Pilate had recourse, in that 
public washing of his hands. He delivers 
Jesus up to be crucified. Therein lay his 
guilt ; he might, and should have refused to 
become a party to his crucifixion. Believing 
Jesus to be innocent, to give him up to death 
was to take a large share of the criminality 
upon himself. And yet he thinks that when 


BEFORE PILATE. 


153 


he gets the Jews to take it upon them that 
he has relieved himself, if not entirely, yet in 
great measure, of the responsibility. He re- 
gards himself as one coerced by others ; and 
when these others are quite willing to take on 
themselves the entire weight of the deed, he 
imagines that this will go a great length in 
clearing him. And if ever, placed under 
strong compulsion from without, urged on to 
a certain course of conduct which in our con- 
science we disapprove, we yield, and in yield- 
ing take comfort to ourselves from others say- 
ing that they are quite ready to incur the 
whole responsibility of the alfair, then let us 
remember that we are acting over again the 
part of Pilate ; and that just as little as that 
outward washing of his hands did anything 
to clear him of the stain heywas contracting, 
so little can we hope that the guilt contracted 
by our being a consenting and co-operating 
party in any deed of injustice or dishonor, 
may thus be mitigated or wiped away. 

Pilate has given up Jesus to the will of 
the multitude ; given him up to be crucified. 


154 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

The judge’s work is done; there remains only 
the work of the executioner. Over that it is 
no part of the Procurator’s office to preside. 
Why, then, does Pilate not withdraw ? We 
might have thought that, wearied with his 
conflict with the rabble, and oppressed with 
painful feelings as to its issue, he would have 
been only too glad to retire — but he cannot : 
a singular fascination still binds him to the 
spot, — perhaps the lingering hope that he 
may yet succeed in rescuing the victim from 
his bloodthirsty enemies. He hands Christ 
over to his soldiers, to have that scourging 
inflicted which was the ordinary precursor 
and preliminary to crucifixion. It might not 
be difficult from the narratives of eye-wit- 
nesses to give you some idea of what a mili- 
tary scourging was, what kind of instrument 
they used in it, what kind of wounds that 
instrument made, what terrible torture was 
inflicted, to what lengths that torture was 
often carried ; but we would rather have a 
veil drawn over the purely physical sufferings 
of our Saviour, than have them pressed pro- 


BEFORE PILATE. 


155 


minently upon our eye. We recoil from the 
attempts so often made to excite a sympa- 
thetic horror by vivid details of our Lord’s 
bodily sufferings. We feel as if it were de- 
grading him to present him in that character, 
in which so many, equal nay superior in their 
claims upon our sympathy, might be put be- 
side him. 

But the scourging did not satisfy the rude 
and brutal soldiers who had got Christ into 
their hands. As Romans, these men knew 
little, cared little about any kingship that 
Christ might claim. With them it could not 
be, as with the Jews, a subject of religious 
hate or scorn. It was a topic alone of ribald 
mirth, of Gentile mockery. This Roman co- 
hort takes the hint that Herod’s men of war 
had given them ; who had thrown a white 
robe over Jesus, clothing him with something 
like the garment that their own kings wore, 
that they might set at naught his vain pre- 
tensions to be a king. And now, when the 
scourging is over, these Roman soldiers will 
outdo their Jewish comrades ; they will make 


156 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

a more perfect pantomime of this poor Gali- 
lean’s royalty. They take some old military 
cloak, of the same color with the robes of 
their emperors; they throw it over his bloody 
shoulders ; they plait a crown of thorns, and 
put it on his head ; they thrust a reed as a 
mock sceptre, into his right hand ; and then, 
when they have got him robed, and crowned, 
and sceptred thus, they bow the knee, and 
hail him as a king. But they tire even of 
that mock homage ; the demon spirit that is 
in them inspires the merriment with a savage 
cruelty ; and so, as if ashamed even of that 
kind of homage they had rendered, they 
snatch impatiently the reed out of his hand, 
and smite with it the crown of thorns, and 
drive it down upon his pierced and bleeding 
brow, and spit upon him, and smite him with 
their hands. 

All this is done in an inner court or guard- 
room, out of sight of the crowd that is still 
waiting without. Pilate sees it all ; makes 
no attempt to mitigate the suffering or the 
mockery ; is absorbed in wonder as he gazes 


BEFORE PILATE. 


157 


upon Jesus — such a picture of silent, gentle, 
meek, unmurmuring, uncomplaining patience ! 
* — standing there, and taking all that treat- 
ment as though no strange thing were hap- 
pening, as if he had expected all, were 
prepared for all, found no difficulty in sub- 
mitting to all. There is no weakness in 
that patience ; but a strength, a power, a 
dignity. The sight moves Pilate’s heart ; it 
would move any heart, he thinks ; may it not 
move even the hearts of those people with- 
out ? may it not satisfy their thirst for ven- 
geance to see the suffering Jesus reduced to 
% such a pitiable plight as this ? He will try 
at least what the sight can do in the way of 
stirring such sympathy. He goes forth, with 
Jesus following, and says to the multitude, 
“ Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye 
may know that I find no fault in him then, 
turning and pointing to Jesus, as he stood 
wearing still the purple robe and the crown 
of thorns, bearing on his face and person the 
marks of all the sufferings and indignities of 
the guardhouse, Pilate says, “Behold the 


158 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

man !” — behold and pity, behold and be satis- 
fied, — behold, and suffer me, now that I have 
thus chastised him, to let him go ! Alas ! he 
knew not the intensity of such fanatic hatred 
as that which those High Priests and rulers 
cherished, and had, for the time, infused into 
the obedient crowd ; how it quenches every 
impulse of kindliness in the human heart, 
and nerves the human hand for deeds of 
utmost cruelty. That sight to which he 
points, instead of moving any pity, only 
evokes fresh outbreaks of ferocious violence ; 
with unabated breath, the same wild cry from 
every side salutes the ear of the Governor — 
“ Crucify him, crucify him !” It not only dis- 
appoints, it provokes Pilate to be baffled thus 
again, and baffled by such a display of im- 
movable and unappeasable malignity. “Take 
ye him and crucify him,” he says, ‘ crucify 
him as best you can, but do not expect that 
I shall countenance the deed by any counter- 
signing of your sentence in condemning the 
man, as if I thought he deserved to die — 


BEFORE PILATE. 


159 


take ye him and crucify him, for I find no 
fault in him/ 

But the yielding Governor is not in this 
way to slip out of their hands ; he, too, must 
be a party ; and now, at last, they tell him 
what hitherto they had concealed — to show 
him that theirs was not such a groundless 
sentence as he imagined it to be — “ We have 
a law,” they said, “ and by our law he ought 
to die, because he made himself the Son of 
God.” It is impossible to say what ideas 
that phrase, “ the Son of God,” excited in 
the mind of Pilate. He was familiar with all 
the legends of the heathen mythologies, which 
told of gods and demigods descending and 
living upon the earth. Like so many of the 
educated Romans of his day, he had thrown 
off all faith in their divinity, and yet some- 
how there still lingered within, a faith in 
something higher than humanity, some beings 
superior to our race. And what if this Jesus 
were one of these ! never in all his intercourse 
with men, had he met one the least like this, 
»ne who looked so kinglike, so Godlike ; 


160 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

Kinglike, Godlike, even there as he now 
stands with a robe of faded purple and a 
crown of plaited thorns. Never in kingly- 
garments, never beneath imperial crown, did 
he see a sceptred sovereign stand so serene, 
so dignified, so far above the men that stood 
round him. Whatever the ideas were which 
passed through Pilate’s mind when he heard 
that Jesus had made himself the Son of God, 
they deepened that awe which from the first 
had been creeping in upon and taking pos- 
session of his spirit : — he was the more afraid. 
Once again, therefore, he takes Christ apart, 
and says to him, “ Whence art thou ? ” ‘ In 

that first interview, you told me that your 
kingdom was not of this world, but whence 
art thou thyself? art thou of this earth, I 
mean like the rest of us, or art thou other 
than thou seemest, — comest thou indeed from 
heaven?’ But Jesus gave him no answer. 
Of all the silences of our Lord that *day, of 
which this in number was the fifth, it seems 
the most difficult to understand. Was it 
that Pilate, by the way in which he had then 


BEFORE PILATE. 


161 


put the question, “ What is truth ?” without 
pausing for a reply, had forfeited his right to 
an answer now ? Was it that Pilate was 
wholly unprepared to receive the answer; 
that it would have been a casting of pearls 
before swine to have told him whence Jesus 
was? Was it that the information, had it 
been given, while ineffectual to stop his 
course, might have aggravated Pilate’s guilt, 
and therefore, in mercy, was withheld ? We 
cannot tell ; but we can perceive that the 
very silence was in itself an answer; for, 
supposing Jesus had been a mere man, had 
come into this world even as we all come, 
would he, had he been sincere and upright, 
have hesitated to say whence he came ? 
would he have allowed Pilate to remain in 
doubt? would he have suffered him, as his 
question evidently implied, to cherish the 
impression that he was something more than 
human? We can scarcely think he would. 
By his very silence, therefore, our Lord 
would throw Pilate back upon that incipient 
impression of his Divine origin, that it 


162 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

might be confirmed and strengthened in his 
breast. 

But here again, even as in the first inter- 
view, the haughtiness of the man comes in to 
quench all deeper thought. Annoyed by this * 
silence, this calmness, this apparent indiffer- 
ence of Jesus, Pilate, in all the pride of office, 
says, “ Speakest thou not to me ; knowest 
thou not that I have power to crucify thee, 
and power to release thee ?” — a very idle at- 
tempt to work upon the mere selfish fears of 
Christ; — a question that brings a speedy 
answer, one in which rebuke and sympathy 
are singularly blended : 6 Thou couldest have 
no power against me, except it were given 
thee from above.” “ That power of thine, to 
crucify me or release, which I do not dispute, 
which thou mayest exercise as thou pleasest, 
— do not think that it is a power original, un- 
derived, independent. Thou hast it, thou ex- 
ercisest it but as Heaven permits ; thou little 
knowest, indeed, what thou doest ; it is as a 
mere holder of the power that thou art act- 
ing, acting at others’ bidding ; therefore, that 


BEFORE PILATE. 


163 


Jewish Judge, who knowing far better at 
least than thou what it was he did, and who 
it was that he was giving up to death/ — 
“ therefore he that delivered me unto thee 
hath the greater sin.” There is something 
surely very impressive here ; that, sunk as 
Jesus was beneath the weight of his own suf- 
ferings — sufferings so acute, that they well 
might have engrossed his thoughts and feel- 
ings, — he yet so calmly weighs in the judicial 
balance the comparative guilt of the actors in 
this sad scene, and excuses, as far as he is 
able, the actings of Pilate. It had something 
of its proper effect upon the Procurator. In- 
stead of diminishing, it but increased the de- 
sire he already had to deliver him. He tried 
again ; tried with still greater earnestness to 
effect his object. But again he failed, for 
now the last arrow in that quiver of his ad- 
versaries is shot at him — “ If thou let this 
man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend ; whoso- 
ever maketh himself a king, speaketh against 
Caesar.” Pilate knew that already he stood 
upon uncertain ground with the imperial au- 


164 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

thorities ; he knew that a fresh report of any 
thing like unfaithfulness to Caesar would cost 
him his office. The risk of losing all that by 
occupying that office he had hoped to gain, 
he was not prepared to face, and so, yielding 
to this last pressure, he gives way, and de- 
livers up Jesus to he crucified. 

Now, let us look a moment at the faults 
and at the virtues of this man. The fact that 
it fell to his lot to he Governor of Judea at 
this time, and to consign the Saviour to the 
cross, inclines us to form exaggerated notions 
of his criminality. He was not, let us be- 
lieve, a worse governor than many who pre- 
ceded and who followed him in that office. 
We know from other sources that he fre- 
quently showed but little regard to human 
life — recklessly, indeed, shed human blood, 
when the shedding of it ministered to the ob- 
jects of his ambition ; but we have no reason 
to believe that he was a wantonly cruel man, 
or a particularly oppressive and tyrannical 
governor, as governors then went. His treat- 
ment of Christ was marked by any thing but 


BEFORE PILATE. 


165 


a contempt for justice and an absence of all 
human feeling. He showed a respect, a pity, 
a tenderness to Jesus Christ that, considering 
the little that he knew of him, excites our 
wonder. He struggled hard to evade the 
conclusion to which, with such unrelenting 
malignity, the Jewish leaders drove him. No 
other king, no other ruler with whom Christ 
or his Apostles had to do, acted half as con- 
scientiously or half as tenderly as Pilate did. 
Herod, Felix, Agrippa, — compare their con- 
duct in like circumstances with that of Pilate, 
and does he not in your estimate rise superior 
to them all ? There is something in the com- 
punctions, the relentings, the hesitations, the 
embarrassments of Pilate — those reiterated 
attempts of his to find a way of escape for 
himself and for Christ, that takes a strong 
hold upon our sympathy. We can not but 
pity, even while forced to condemn. Con- 
demn, indeed, we must ; for — 

1. He was false to his own convictions ; he 
was satisfied that Christ was innocent. In- 
stead of acting at once and decidedly upon 


166 CHRIST’S SECOND APPEARANCE 

that conviction, he dallied and he parleyed 
ydth it ; sought to find some way by which 
he might get rid of that clear and imperative 
duty which it laid upon him and by so doing 
he weakened and unsettled this conviction, 
and prepared for its being overborne. 

2. He exhibited a sad degree of vacillation, 
inconsistency, indecision. Now he throws all 
blame upon the Priests : “ I am innocent of 
his blood ; see ye to it.” Again, he takes 
the entire responsibility upon himself : 
“ Knowest thou not that I have power to 
crucify thee, and power to release ?” Now 
he pronounces Jesus innocent, yet with the 
same breath proposes to have him punished 
as guilty : now he gives him up, and then he 
has recourse to every kind of expedient to 
rescue. Unstable as water, he does not, he 
cannot succeed. 

3. He allowed others to dictate to him. 
Carelessly and inconsiderately he submits 
that to their judgment which he should have 
kept wholly within his own hold. He be- 
comes thus as a wave of the sea, as a feather 


BEFORE PILATE. 


167 


in the air, which every breeze of heaven 
bloweth about as it listeth. 

4. He allowed worldly interest to pre- 
dominate over the sense of duty. Such was 
the plain and simple issue to which it came 
at last : Do the thing he knew was right — 
acquit the Saviour — do that, and run all 
risks ; or do the thing he knew was wrong — 
do that, and escape all danger. Such was 
the alternative which was at last presented 
to him. Alas for Pilate ! he chose the latter. 
But let each of us now ask himself, Had I 
been placed exactly in his position, with those 
lights only to guide me that he then had, 
should I have acted a better and bolder part ? 
We may think and hope we should ; but, in 
thinking so and hoping so, let us remember 
how often, when conscience and duty pointed 
in the one direction, and passion and self- 
interest pointed in the other, we have acted 
over and over again the very part of Pilate ; 
hesitated and wavered, and argued and de- 
bated, and opened our ears to what others 
told us, or allowed ourselves to be borne away 


168 SECOND APPEARANCE BEFORE PILATE. 

by some strong tide that was running in the 
wrong direction. Nay more, how often have 
we, knowing as we do, or profess to do, who 
Christ was, whence he came, what he did for 
us, and whither he has gone, — how often have 
we given him up into unfriendly hands, to do 
with him what they would, without even the 
washing of our own, or the saying what we 
thought of him ! 


VII. 


Site jnmtijMfr.s of wiping* 

The mockeries of the Judgment Hall ended. 
Jesus is delivered into the hands of the offi- 
cers, to be led away to the place of execution. 
It cannot now be settled with certainty or 
exactness, where this hill of Calvary was 
situated, nor how far it was from the resi- 
dence of Pilate. It lay, we know, without 
the city gate, and a very ancient tradition 
points us to a low, bare, rounded elevation, 
outside and near the walls, which resembled 
somewhat in its form a human skull, and is 
supposed to have got from that resemblance 
the name it bore, of Golgotha. If that indeed 
was Calvary, the way was but a short one 
which the sad procession had to traverse. 

* Matt, xxvii. 31-34; Luke xxiii. 27-32. 

8 


170 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


First, however, ere beginning the mournful 
march, they strip our Lord of the purple robe 
they had thrown around his bleeding shoul- 
ders, and put his own raiment on him. It is 
not said that they took the crown of thorns 
from his bleeding brow ; he may have worn 
that to the last. It was part of the degrada- 
tion of a public crucifixion that the doomed 
one should assist in carrying to the place of 
crucifixion the instrument of death. They 
might have spared this indignity to Jesus ; 
they might have had some compassion as 
they saw with what a faint and weary step 
he walked. But compassion has no place in 
the hearts of these crucifiers, and so they lay 
the common burden on him. He sinks be- - 
neath the load. They must relieve him of 
it ; but who will bear it instead ? not one of 
themselves will stoop to the low office. A 
stranger, a man from Africa, Simon the Cy- 
renian, ? coming in from the country, meets 
them by the way. He would willingly have 
let the crowd go by that presses on to Cal- 
vary. But he is the very kind of man whom 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


171 


they can turn into a tool to do this piece of 
drudgery. They lay hold of him and compel 
him to take up what Jesus was too weak to 
hear. Unwillingly he had to obey, to turn 
upon his steps, and follow Jesus, bearing after 
him the cross ; a reluctant instrument of an 
overhearing soldiery and a haughty priest- 
hood. 

So far as we can learn, Simon had no pre- 
vious knowledge of, had no special interest in 
Christ ; instead of any great sympathy with 
him at the moment, he may rather have felt 
and resented it as a hardship, that such a ser- 
vice should have been exacted of him, and in 
such imperious fashion. But this compulsory 
companionship with Jesus in the hearing of 
the cross, carried him to Calvary ; the sad 
tragedy enacted there forced him with so 
many other idle spectators to the spot. He 
stood there gazing upon the scene ; he heard 
the words that came from the lips of Jesus ; 
he felt the three hours’ darkness come down, 
and wrap them all around. As the darkness 
cleared away, he saw the centurion standing 


172 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


transfixed before the central cross, as Jesus 
cried with a loud voice, and gave up the 
ghost. He heard that Roman officer, a stran- 
ger like himself, break forth with the excla- 
mation : “ Truly this was the Son of God !” 
What impression all that he saw and heard 
then made upon him we are not informed. 
From its being said, however, that he was the 
father of Alexander and Rufus, whom Mark 
speaks of as being well-known disciples of 
the Lord, may we not indulge the belief that 
he who, when he was lifted up, was to draw 
all men unto him, that day drew this Cyrenian 
to himself ; that the sight of those sufferings 
and of that death led Simon to inquire ; that 
the inquiry conducted to discipleship ; and 
that ever after he had to thank the Lord for 
the strange arrangement of his providence, 
which led him along that way into the city, 
at the very time when they were leading 
Jesus out to be crucified ; that he met the 
crowd at the very moment that they were 
wanting some one to do that menial service 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


173 


which in so rough a manner they pressed him 
to undertake ? 

Another incident marked the sorrowful 
procession to Calvary. Some women of the 
city, looking at him, as first he bends beneath 
the cross, and then, with aspect so meek and 
gentle, yet so sad and sorrow-stricken, moves 
onward to be crucified, have their feelings so 
deeply touched, that, unable to restrain their 
emotions, they openly bewail and lament his 
doom. These are not the women who had 
followed him from Galilee, and been in the 
habit of ministering to him. No more than 
Simon, were they numbered with his disci- 
ples. It was not with such grief as any of 
the Marys would have felt, had they been in 
the crowd, that these women were affected. 
They were not lamenting the loss of a teacher, 
a master, a friend they had learned to revere 
and love. They had joined the crowd as it 
gathered in the city thoroughfares through 
which it passed. The singular but common 
curiosity to look at men who are soon to die, 
and to see how they comport themselves in 


174 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


front of death, has drawn them on. Soon, 
however, out of the three who are going forth 
to he crucified, their attention fixes upon 
Jesus. Something of him they may have 
known before ; some part of his story they 
may have picked up by the way. They hear 
nothing friendly to him from any who are 
there around them. The spirit of the crowd 
they mingle with is one of rude and hitter 
hatred towards him. But woman’s loving eye 
looks on him, woman’s tender heart is melted 
at the sight ; and, despite of all the restraint 
that might have been imposed on them by the 
tone and temper of that crowd, revelling with 
savage delight at the prospect of his cruci- 
fixion, and led on by some of the chief men 
of the city, they give free vent to that gen- 
erous pity which swells their bosoms. They 
weep as they follow him. This weeping, the 
only circumstance, so far as we know, attend- 
ing his passage out to Calvary, that attracted 
the special notice of our Lord, was the only 
one which induced him to break the patient 
silence he all along observed. But how does 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


175 


he notice it ? What does he sa} r ? He 
stops ; he turns ; he fixes his eye upon the 
weepers ; and he says, “ Daughters of Jeru- 
salem, weep not for me, hut weep for your- 
selves, and for your children.” 

“ Weep not for me .” Does he reject that 
simple tribute of sympathy which they are 
rendering ? Is he in any sense displeased at 
the tears they shed ? Does he blame or for- 
bid such tears ? Not thus are we to interpret 
our Saviours words. It may be quite true 
that it was not from any very deep, much less 
from any very pure or holy fountain, that 
those tears were flowing. It may have been 
nothing about him but the shame and the 
agony he had to suffer which drew them out. 
Still, they are tears of kindly pity, and such 
tears it never could have been his meaning or 
intention to condemn. lie had freely shed 
such tears himself. They fell before the 
tomb of Lazarus, fell simply at sight of the 
weeping sisters, and of the Jews weeping 
along with them. Sympathy with human 
suffering, simply and purely as such, claims 


176 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


the sanction of the tears which upon that 
occasion the Saviour shed ; and that sanction 
covers the bewailing of these daughters of 
Jerusalem. Jesus is not displeased with, 
Jesus does not reject, the expression of their 
pity. So far from this, the tender sympathy 
that they show for him stirs a still deeper 
sympathy for them within his heart. This is 
the way that he acknowledges and thanks 
them for their tears. He thinks of them, he 
feels for them ; he forgets his own impending 
griefs as he contemplates theirs. It had been 
but an hour or so before, that all the people 
who gathered round the bar of Pilate had 
cried out, “His blood be on us, and on our 
children !” How little did they know what a 
doom it was they thus invoked upon them- 
selves ; how near and how terrible ! But 
Jesus knew it; had thought of it perhaps 
when that wild cry arose ; was thinking of it 
still. He had those scenes of famine, fire, 
and slaughter, when that ill-fated city of his 
crucifiers should see the execution of the sen- 
tence they had called down upon their own 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


177 


head, — he had them all before his eye when 
he turned to those women by the way, and 
said to them, u Daughters of J erusalem, weep 
not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for 
your children. For, behold, the days are 
coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed 
are the barren, and the wombs that never 
bare, and the paps which never gave suck. 
Then shall they begin to say to the moun- 
tains, Fall on us ; and to the hills, Cover us.” 

Many of the very women who were lament- 
ing Jesus by the way, may have perished in 
the siege of Jerusalem. That siege took 
place within less than forty years from the 
day of our Lord’s crucifixion. Some of the 
younger mothers of that weeping band, would 
not have then seen out the threescore years 
and ten of human life. Their children would 
be all in middle life, constituting the genera- 
tion upon which those woes were to descend 
which, three days before, while sitting quietly 
on the Mount of Olives with his disciples, 
looking across the valley upon the Holy City, 
Jesus had described by saying, that in those 


178 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


days there should be great tribulation, such 
as was not from the beginning of the world to 
that time, no, nor even should be again. 
When in the straitness of that terrible siege, 
before the terrors of the last assault, they 
crept into the underground passages and sew- 
ers of the city ; when those who escaped out 
of the city hid themselves in the dens and 
rocks of the mountains, — then were those 
prophecies of Isaiah and Hosea, which our 
Saviour had obviously before him — some of 
whose words, indeed, he quotes — in part ful- 
fdled. But just as, in that more lengthened 
discourse which our Lord had so recently 
delivered to his disciples, he mixed up in a 
way that it is impossible wholly to unravel, 
the destruction of Jerusalem, his second com- 
ing, and the end of the world ; so also, even 
within the compass of this short speech to the 
daughters of Jerusalem, it is easy enough to 
perceive that, beyond that nearer and more 
limited event, of which these women and their 
children were to be spectators, our Lord looks 
forward to the wider judgment, which at the 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


179 


close of all was to enfold the whole world of 
the impenitent in its embrace. 

And widening thus, as we are warranted to 
do, the scope and bearing of our Lord’s words 
to these daughters of Jerusalem, let us ask 
ourselves, what message of instruction and of 
warning do they convey to us and to all men ? 
First, I think we shall not be wrong if we 
interpret them as indicating to us the unpro- 
fitableness of that sympathy with human suf- 
fering which takes in nothing but the suffer- 
ing it sees, and which expends itself alone in 
tears. The sympathy excited in the breasts 
of these women of Jerusalem was of this kind. 
It was the spectacle of human grief then be- 
fore their eyes which had awakened it ; there 
was a danger, at least, that those sensibilities, 
so deeply moved as long as the spectacle was 
before them, should collapse when that spec- 
tacle was withdrawn, and leave the heart 
quickened, it might be, in its susceptibility to 
the mere emotion of compassion, yet not other- 
wise improved. Weep not, then, the Saviour 
says to them, and says to us; weep not for 


180 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


me ; weep not, or weep not long, and weep 
not idly, over any sight or story of human 
suffering which calls not for your interference, 
which you have no power, not even by the 
sympathy that you expend upon it, to miti- 
gate ; or if, naturally and irresistibly, properly 
and becomingly, your tears flow forth, stop 
not at their shedding, do not indolently in- 
dulge the mere sentiment of pity ; such in- 
dulgence may become but a piece of selfish 
gratification, narrowing the heart and paralyz- 
ing the hand for the dispositions and the do- 
ings of a true and genuine benevolence. Pity 
was never meant by the Creator to be separ- 
ately or exclusively cultivated as an isolated 
emotion; it was meant to be the spring and 
the ally of a ready and generous aid held out 
to its object; to be the stimulus to, and the 
support of active effort. And such is the 
structure of that beautiful and nicely-balanced 
instrument, the human spirit, that if this 
established connexion between action and 
emotion be overlooked ; if you foster the one 
without letting it lead on to the other, you 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


181 


do a serious damage to the soul ; you create 
in one region a monstrous overgrowth, in an- 
other a stunted deformity ; and you dislocate 
and disconnect what the Creator intended 
should always he conjoined. 

Take here the familiar instance of indulg- 
ing to excess the reading of exciting fiction — 
tales in which the hero of the story passes 
through terrible trials, endurances, agonies of 
mind and heart. Our heart may pulsate all 
through with pity as we read ; we may wet 
with tears the page that spreads out some 
heart-rending scene. Now, I am not going to 
say that it is in itself a wrong, or a sinful 
thing, or even a hurtful thing, to read such 
stories. On the contrary, I believe that it is 
not wrong ; that it may be as beneficial as it 
is agreeable occasionally to do so. There are 
peculiar and there are good services to mind 
and heart that a well-executed fiction may 
render, which you cannot have rendered in 
any other way so well. But let such kind of 
reading usurp the place that should be given 
to other and better employment ; let the taste 


182 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


for it be gratified, without the consideration 
of anything beyond the pleasure that it 
yields ; let the heart of the reader, with all 
its manifold affections, give itself up to be 
played upon continually by the hand of some 
great master in the art of quickening to the 
uttermost its sympathies with human passions 
and human griefs ; will that heart, whose sen- 
sibilities may thus be stimulated until it yield 
to the gentlest touch of the great describer, 
will it be made kinder and better in its dispo- 
sitions ? will it even be made more tender to 
the sorrows of the real sufferers among whom 
it lives and moves ? Is it not notoriously the 
reverse ? You will find few mor6 selfish, few 
less practically benevolent than those who 
expend all their stores of pity upon ideal 
woes. It is a deep well of pity, that which 
God has sunk in most human hearts. They 
are healing, refreshing, fructifying waters that 
it sends forth to cover the sorrows of the sor- 
rowful ; but if these waters be dammed up 
within the heart, they become first stagnant, 
and then the breeders of many noxious va- 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


183 


pors, under which the true and simple chari- 
ties wither away. 

But let us now give to our Lord’s words a 
more direct application to himself ; to himself 
as the hearer of the cross. It cannot be 
thought that all sympathy with the Man of 
sorrows is forbidden. The recital, especially 
of his last sufferings, would not have been so 
full and so minu^Us it is in the sacred page, 
had it not been intended to take hold thereby 
of that sympathy. But the contemplation of 
Christ merely as a sufferer, if it terminate in 
nothing else than the excitement of sympa- 
thy, is a barren contemplation. Offer him 
nothing besides your compassion, he repu- 
diates and rejects it. It is to dishonor the 
Redeemer to class him with those unfortu- 
nates, those unwilling victims of distress, 
whose unexampled sorrows knock hard at 
the heart for pity. Our pity he does not 
ask, he does not need. He spreads out before 
us his unparalleled griefs ; he says, “ Behold, 
and see if there be any sorrow like unto my 
sorrow but he does so not to win from us 


184 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


compassion, but to prove bow he has loved 
us, loved us even to the death, suffering and 
dying for our redemption. His sorrows should 
set us thinking of our sins. Those sufferings 
which rested upon him when he took his 
place as our great Head and Representative, 
should bring up before our minds the suffer- 
ings which hang suspended over the heads of 
the finally impenitent and unbelieving. 

“Weep not for me, but weep for your- 
selves : for if these things be done in a green 
tree, what shall be done in the dry ?” He 
was himself the Green Tree ; the fresh, the 
vigorous Vine, — its stock full of sap, its' 
branches all nourished by union with that 
parent, life-giving Stem. Was he, then — in 
condition so unlike to that of fuel ready for 
the fire — cast into that great furnace of afflic- 
tion? Had he to endure all its scorching, 
though to him unconsuming flames ? What 
shall be done with him whose heart softens 
not at the sight of this divine and all-endur- 
ing love : whose heart closes up and hardens 
against God and Christ, till it becomes like 


JERUSALEM WEEPING* 


185 


one of those dry and withered branches which 
men gather and cast into the fire ? If God 
spared not his own Son, but gave him up to 
the death for us all, who is there, among the 
rejecters and despisers of such a Saviour, that 
he will spare ? Or if you would have the 
same argument set before you in yet another 
form, take it as presented by Peter : “ For 
the time is come that judgment must begin at 
the house of God : and if it first begin at us, 
what shall the end be of them that obey not 
the gospel of God ? And if the righteous 
scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly 
and the sinner appear?” I shall make no 
attempt either to expand or enforce the argu- 
ment thus employed. Let me only remind 
you, that it was by these strange and solemn 
words of warning, “ If they do these things 
in a green tree, what shall be done in the 
dry ?” that our Lord closed the public teach- 
ing of his ministry upon earth. Quiet as our 
skies now look, and secure and stable as all 
things around us seem, the days are coming, 
. — he has told us among his latest sayings, — • 


186 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


when those who resist the approaches of his 
love shall see him in other guise, and when at 
the sight they shall cry to the mountains, 
“Fall on us, and to the hills, Cov^r us; hide 
Us from the face of him that sitteth upon the 
throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb : fur 
the great day of his wrath is come ; and who 
shall be able to stand ?” How wise and good 
a thing were it for us all, in prospect of such 
days coming, to hide ourselves even now in 
the clefts of the smitten Rock ; to hide our- 
selves in Jesus Christ as our loving Lord and 
Saviour; that, safe within that covert, the 
tribulation of those days may not reach us ! 

And now let me crave your attention, for a 
moment or two, to that singular tie of thought 
which so quickly linked together in the mind 
of the Saviour the sight of those sorrowful 
daughters of Jerusalem, with the fearful doom 
that was impending over their city. It is 
very remarkable how frequently and how 
vividly, in all its minute details, the coming 
destruction of Jerusalem was present to his 
thoughts during the last days and hours of 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


187 


liis earthly ministry. From the day that he 
raised Lazarus from the grave, — knowing that 
his enemies had taken counsel together to put 
him to death, — J esus walked no more openly 
among the Jews. He retired to the country 
beyond Jordan, near to the wilderness. His 
hour at last approached, and he set his face 
to go up to Jerusalem to he crucified. He 
was in a part of the country that was under 
Herod’s jurisdiction, and they told him that 
Herod sought to kill him. It cannot he, he 
said, that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. 
The naming of the holy city ; the thought of 
all the blood of all the prophets that was to 
cry out against her, and to seal her doom, 
filled his heart with sadness, and instantly he 
broke out into the exclamation, “ 0 Jerusa- 
lem, Jerusalem ! thou that killest the pro- 
phets, and stonest them which are sent unto 
thee, how often would I have gathered thy 
children together, even as a hen gathereth 
her chickens under her wings, and ye would 
not ! Behold, your house is left unto you 
desolate !” 


188 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


On the Saturday before his death he arrives 
at Bethany. Next day he ascends the Mount 
of Olives. In the city they have heard of 
his coming. They go out to meet him, they 
hail him as they had never done before. 
Garments and palm-branches are spread upon 
the ground that he is to tread. Before him 
and around him the voices of the multitude 
are shouting “ Hosanna ! Blessed is he that 
cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna 
to the Son of David ! Hosanna in the high- 
est !” The ridge of the hill is reached, and 
Jerusalem bursts upon the view, lying across 
the valley spread out before the eye. He 
pauses ; he gazes ; his eyes they fill with 
tears. How strange it looks to that jubilant 
multitude ! Ah ! other sounds than their 
hosannas are falling on the Saviour’s inner 
ear; other sights than that of their waving 
palm-branches are rising before his prophetic 
eye. He weeps; and, without naming it, 
looking at the doomed city, and pointing to 
it, he says : “ If thou hadst known, even thou, 
at least in this thy day, the things which be- 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


189 


long unto thy peace ! but now they are hid 
from thine eyes. For the days shall come 
upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a 
trench about thee, and compass thee round, 
and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay 
thee even with the ground, and thy children 
within thee ; and they shall not leave in thee 
one stone upon another ; because thou knew- 
est not the time of thy visitation.” 

Christ’s last day in the Temple and in 
Jerusalem was one of great excitement, of 
varied incident. Question after question 
about his authority to teach, about the pay- 
ment of tribute-money, about the resurrec- 
tion of the dead, is put to him. Attempt 
after attempt is made to entangle him in his 
talk. At last, from being the assailed, Jesus 
in his turn becomes the assailant, puts the 
question about Christ being David’s Son and 
David’s Lord, which none of them can an- 
swer, and then proceeds to launch his terrible 
denunciations at the Scribes and Pharisees. 
Woe is heaped upon woe, till all the righteous 
blood shed upon the earth seems coming on 


190 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


the men. of that generation, and concen- 
tratedly upon that city of Jerusalem. Again, 
as when he first turned his face towards the 
holy city, the thought melts his spirit into 
tenderness; the indignation dissolves and 
passes away, as, taking up the same words 
he had used before, he exclaims, u 0 Jerusa- 
lem, J erusalem ! thou that killest the pro- 
phets, and stonest them which are sent unto 
thee, how often would I have gathered thy 
children together, even as a hen gathereth 
her chickens under her wings, and ye would 
not ! Behold, your house is .left unto you 
desolate,” — our Lord’s last words within the 
Temple. 

As they went out in the afternoon of that 
day, “ Master,” said one of his disciples to 
him, “ see what manner of stones and what 
buildings are here ! Jesus answering, said 
unto him, Seest thou these great buildings ? 
Verily I say unto you, there shall not be left 
here one stone upon another that shall not be 
thrown down.” Later in the evening of that 
day — two days before his crucifixion — he sat 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


191 


upon the Mount of Olives over against the 
Temple, looking once again at these great 
buildings, and in answer to an inquiry of his 
disciples, tired though he must have been 
with all the incidents of a most harassing day, 
he entered upon that lengthened prophecy in 
which he told how Jerusalem should be trod- 
den down of the Gentiles. And now again, 
in this last stage of his way to Calvary, the 
days that he had spoken of so particularly in 
that prophecy are once more before his eyes. 
How shall we explain all this ? How was it 
that the city of Jerusalem had such a hold 
upon the heart of Jesus Christ? How was it 
that the joys and the sorrows, the provoca- 
tions and the sympathies of his latest days, 
all alike, by some mysterious link of associa- 
tion, called up before his thoughts the terrible 
calamities which Jerusalem was to endure ? 
Grant all that can be claimed for Jerusalem 
in the way of pre-eminence both as to cha- 
racter and destiny over all the cities of this 
earth ; acknowledge the power that the close 
connexion between our Lord’s own death and 


192 


THE DAUGHTERS OF 


its destruction must have exerted upon his 
mind ; but beside all this, may we not believe 
that in the human heart of J esus, as we know 
that there was room for special affection, indi- 
vidual attachment, so also was there room for 
the patriotic sentiment, that love of country 
by which every true man of woman born is 
characterized ? Jesus was a Jew. Judea 
was the land of his birth. Jerusalem was 
the chief city of that land. Around its ear- 
lier and its later history there gathered all of 
joyful and of sorrowful interest that could 
touch a Jewish heart. And it touched the 
spirit of Jesus to contemplate its downfall. 
Are we wrong in thinking that with that 
which was divine, and that which was broadly 
human, there mingled a Jewish, a patriotic 
element in the grief which shed tears over its 
destruction? If love of country form part of 
a perfect man, shall we not believe that, puri- 
fied from all imperfection, — its narrowness, 
its exclusiveness, its selfishness, — that affec- 
tion had a place and found a home in the 
bosom of our Lord ? 


JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


193 


At such a season as this in the history of 
our own land we would fain believe so. A 
common loss, a common grief, a common 
sympathy, has knit all hearts together as 
they have hut rarely been united. He can ^ 
have been no ordinary Prince, whose death 
has caused so general, such universal grief. 
And she assuredly is no ordinary Queen, 
whose sorrow has been made their own by so 
many millions of human hearts. There is 
something cementing, purifying, ennobling, in 
a whole nation mourning as ours does now. 
Let us try to consecrate that mourning, and 
whilst we give to our beloved Sovereign the 
entire sympathy of our heart, only wishing 
that she fully knew* what a place she holds 
in the affections of her people, let us lift up 
our hearts in gratitude to Him who has be- 
stowed on us in her such a priceless treasure, 
and let us lift up prayers to heaven, that she 
may have imparted to her that comfort and 


* This Lecture was delivered on the Sunday succeeding the 
death of the Prince Consort, and before full expression of public 
sympathy had been given. 


194 DAUGHTERS OF JERUSALEM WEEPING. 


that strength, which, in such sorrow as hers, 
the highest and the humblest of earth equally 
need, and which are bestowed alike on all 
who ask, and trust, and hope, in and through 
Jesus Christ our Lord. 


VIII. 


^jenit^ut Ifttef * 

One of the first things done by the Roman 
soldiers to whom the execution of the sen- 
tence was committed, was to strip our Sa- 
viour and to nail him to the cross. We do 
not know whether that cruel operation of 
transfixing the hands and feet was performed 
while the cross yet lay upon the ground, or 
after it was erected. They offered him, — in 
kindness let us believe rather than in scorn, 
wine mingled with myrrh, an anodyne or 
soothing draught, fitted to dull or deaden the 
sense of pain, but he waved it away ; he 
would do nothing that might lull the senses, 
but might at the same time impair the full, 
clear, mental consciousness. The clothing of 

* Matt, xxvii. 35-37 ; John xix. 20-22 ; Luke xxiii. 23-43. 


196 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


the criminal was in all such instances a legal 
perquisite of the executioners, and the sol- 
diers proceeded to divide it among them. 
The other parts of his outer raiment they 
found it comparatively easy to divide ; but 
when they came to his inner coat, finding it 
of somewhat unusual texture, woven from the 
top throughout — it may have been his mother’s 
workmanship, or the gift of some of those 
kind women who had ministered to his wants 
and comforts — they found no way of disposing 
of it so easy as to cast lots among them whose 
it should he, fulfilling thus, but all uncon- 
sciously, that Scripture, which, apart from 
this manner of disposal of the clothing, we 
might not well have understood how it could 
be verified — “ They parted my raiment among 
them, and for my vesture they did cast lots.” 

Pilate’s last act that morning, after he had 
given up Jesus to be crucified, was to have 
the ground of his sentence declared in a writ- 
ing which he directed should be placed corv- 
spicuously upon the cross above his head. To 
secure that this writing should be seen and 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


197 


read of all men, Pilate further ordered that 
it should be written in Greek, and Latin, and 
Hebrew, the three chief languages of the 
time. All the four evangelists record what 
this writing or superscription was, yet in each 
the words of which it was composed are dif- 
ferently reported. No two of them agree as 
to the precise terms of the title, though all 
of them are perfectly at one as to its meaning 
and intent. It does not in the least surprise 
us when four different narrators of some 
spoken, and it may be lengthened discourse, 
vary here and there in the exact words im- 
puted to the speaker. It is somewhat differ- 
ent when it is a short written public docu- 
ment, like that placed over the Saviour’s 
head on this occasion, the contents of which 
are given. Here we might naturally have 
expected that the very words — literatim et 
verbatim — would have been preserved. And 
if it be not so, in this case as well as in 
others equally if not more remarkable, such 
as that of the few words spoken by the voice 
from heaven at the time of the Saviour’s bap- 


198 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


tism, and those spoken by onr Lord himself 
at the institution of his own Supper, — if it 
be the general sense, and not the exact words 
which the sacred writers present to us, is 
there no warning in this against the expecta- 
tion of finding a minute and literal exactness 
everywhere in the gospel narrative ? no 
warning against our treating that narrative 
as if such kind of exactness had been in- 
tended, and is to be found therein ? 

The sight of this title, posted up so promi- 
nently above the head of Jesus, annoyed the 
Jews. The Chief Priests were especially 
provoked ; nor have we far to go to discover 
the reason of their provocation. Among the 
last things Pilate said to them, when he 
brought out Jesus, had been, “ Behold your 
king !” And among the last things they said 
to Pilate, in the heat of their exasperation, 
and the urgency of their desire to have Jesus 
ordered off to instant crucifixion, was, 
“ Away, away with him ! crucify him ! we 
have no king but Ccesar ” — this man is not 
only a false pretender, but he and all others 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


199 


except Csesar are traitors who make any such 
pretension. Thus, in that unguarded hour, 
did they absolutely renounce all desire or 
hope of having a king of their own. Pilate 
took them at their word, and put over Christ’s 
head such a title as implied that any one 
claiming to be king of the Jews might, on 
that ground alone, whatever his rights and 
claims — on the ground simply of the alle- 
giance which the Jews owed, and which the 
Chief Priests had avowed, to the Roman 
Emperor — be justly condemned to death. 
When they looked at that legal declaration 
of his crime placed above Christ’s head, and 
thought of all that it implied, the Chief 
Priests hurried back to Pilate, and asked him 
to make a modification of it, which should 
leave it open that there might be another 
king of the Jews besides Caesar. “ Write 
not,” they said to Pilate, “ The King of the 
Jews ; but that he said, I am King of the 
Jews.” Let it be made patent, that it was 
as an illegitimate claimant that he was put to 
death. In ill humor with himself, in worse 


200 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


humor with them, Pilate is in no mood to 
listen to their proposal. He will hold them 
tightly to their own denial and disavowal of 
any king but Caesar ; and so, with a somewhat 
sharp and surly decisiveness, he dismisses 
them by saying, “ What I have written, I 
have written.” 

Meanwhile, the soldiers have completed 
their cruel work. It was when in their hands, 
or soon after, that Jesus said, “ Father, for- 
give them, for they know not what they do.” 
Such rough handling as that to which our 
Lord had been subjected, such acute bodily 
suffering as it had inflicted, have a strong 
tendency to irritate, and to render the suf- 
ferer indifferent to everything beyond his own 
injuries and pains. But how far above this 
does Jesus rise ? No murmuring; no threaten- 
ing ; no accusation ; no lament ; no cry for 
help ; no invoking of vengeance ; no care for, 
or thought of self ; no obtruding of his own 
forgiveness. It is not, I forgive you; but, 
“ Father, forgive them.” No sidelong glance 
even at his own wrongs and sufferings, in 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


201 


stating for what the forgiveness is solicited. 
“ They know not what they do in this sim- 
ple and sublime petition, not the slightest, 
most shadowy trace of self-consideration. It 
is from a heart occupied with thought for 
others, and not with its own woes ; it is out 
of the depths of an infinite love and pity, 
which no waters can quench, that there comes 
forth the purest and highest petition for mercy 
that ever ascended to the Father of mercies 
in the heavens. It is from the lips of a 
Brother-Man that this petition comes, yet 
from One who can speak to God as to his own 
Father. It is from Jesus on the cross it 
comes ; from him who submits to all the shame 
and agony of crucifixion, that as the Lamb 
that once was slain for us, he might earn, as 
it were, the right thus to pray, and furnish 
himself with a plea in praying, such as none 
but he possesseth and can employ. As a 
Prophet, he had spoken to the daughters of 
Jerusalem by the way; as the great High 
Priest, he intercedes for his crucifiers from 
the cross. 


202 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


Nor are we to confine that intercession to 
those for whom in the first instance it was 
exerted. Wide over the whole range of sin- 
ful humanity does that prayer of our Re- 
deemer extend. For every sinner of our 
race, if it he true of him that he knew not 
what he did, that Prayer of Jesus goes up to 
the throne of mercy. It was in comparative 
ignorance that those soldiers and those Jews 
crucified Jesus. Had they known what they 
did, we have an apostle’s testimony for believ- 
ing they would not have crucified the Lord 
of glory. But their ignorance did not take 
away their guilt. Had it done so, there had 
been no need of an intercessor in their behalf. 
It was with wicked hands they did that deed. 
Nor did their ignorance in any way entitle 
them to forgiveness ; then might it have been 
left to the Father to deal with them without 
any intercession of the Son. But their ignor- 
ance brought them and their doings within 
the pale of that Divine mercy for which the 
prayer of the great Mediator was presented. 
How far we are entitled to carry this idea, I 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


203 


shall not presume to say. Was it because of 
that element — the element of an imperfect 
knowledge of what was done — that for the 
transgression of man a Saviour and a sacrifice 
were provided, — not provided for the sin of 
fallen angels, of whom it could not, in the 
same sense, he said that they knew not what 
they did ? Is it to that degree in which a 
partial ignorance of what we do, prevails — 
that ignorance not being of itself entirely our 
own fault — that our transgression comes with- 
in the scope and power of the intercession of 
the Redeemer? To questions such as these 
we venture no reply. Only let us remember 
that sins rise in magnitude as they are com- 
mitted against light, and that the clearer and 
fuller that light is, and the greater and more 
determined and obstinate our resistance to it, 
the nearer we approach to that condition 
which the apostle had in his eye when he 
wrote these words of warning : “For it is im- 
possible for those who were once enlightened, 
and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were 
made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have 


204 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


tasted the good word of God, and the powers 
of the world to come, if they shall fall away, 
to renew them again unto repentance, seeing 
they crucify to themselves the Son of God 
afresh, and put him to an open shame ; for if 
we sin wilfully after we have received the 
knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no 
more sacrifice for sins, hut a certain fearful 
looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, 
which shall devour the adversaries.” 

Their cruel work completed, the soldiers sit 
down before the cross to watch. Behind them 
the people stand beholding. There is a mo- 
mentary stillness. It is broken by some pass- 
ers by — for the cross was raised near some 
public thoroughfare — who, stopping for a mo- 
ment as they pass, look up, and wag their 
heads at Jesus, saying contemptuously to him, 
“ Ah ! thou that destroy est the Temple, and 
buildest it in three days, save thyself! If 
thou be the Son of God, come down from the 
cross.” That ribald speech strikes the key- 
note for other like fiendish taunts and gibes. 
The Chief Priests, the scribes, the elders — 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


205 


their dignity forgotten — hasten to join the 
mockery; to deaden perhaps some unwelcome 
voices rising within their hearts. They do 
not act, however, like the honest common 
people, who in their passing by look up at or 
speak directly to Jesus, — they do not, they 
dare not. They stand repeating, as Mark 
tells us, among themselves ; saying of him, not 
to him, “ He saved others, himself he cannot 
save ; let him save himself if he be the Christy 
the chosen of God. If he be the King of 
Israel, let him come down from the cross, and 
we will believe him. He trusted in God 
(strange that they should thus blasphemously 
use the very words of the twenty-second 
Psalm), let him deliver him now if he will 
have him, for he said, I am the Son of God.” 
The Homan soldiers get excited by the talk 
they hear going on around. They rise, and 
they offer him some vinegar to drink, repeat- 
ing one of the current taunts, till at last one 
of the malefactors, hanging on the cross beside 
him, does the same. 

Strange, certainly, that among those who 


206 


THE PENITENT THIEF 


rail at Jesus at such a time, one of those cru- 
cified along with him should be numbered. 
Those brought out to share together the shame 
and agony of a public execution, have gen- 
erally looked on each other with a kindly and 
indulgent eye. Outcasts from the world’s 
sympathy, they have drawm largely upon the 
sympathy of one another. Since they were 
to die thus together, they have desired to die 
at peace. Many an old, deep grudge has 
been buried at the gallows-foot. But here, 
where there is nothing to be mutually forgot- 
ten, nothing to be forgiven, nothing whatever 
to check the operation of that common law by 
which community in suffering begets sym- 
pathy; here, instead of sympathy, there is 
scorn ; instead of pity, reproach. What called 
forth such feelings, at such a time, and from 
such a quarter ? In part it may have been 
due to the circumstance that it was upon 
Jesus that the main burden of the public re- 
proach was flung. Bad men like to join with 
others in blaming those who either are, or are 
supposed to be, worse men than themselves. 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


207 


And so it may have brought something like 
relief, may even have ministered something 
like gratification to this man to find that when 
brought out for execution, the tide of public 
indignation directed itself so exclusively 
against Jesus — by making so much more of 
whose criminality, he thinks to make so much 
less of his own. Or is it the spirit of the 
religious scoffer that vents here its expiring 
breath ? All he sees, and all he hears — those 
pouting lips, those wagging heads, those up- 
braiding speeches — tell him what it was in 
Jesus that had kindled such enmity against 
him, and too thoroughly does he go in with 
that spirit which is rife around the cross, not 
to join in the expression of it, and so whilst 
others are railing at Jesus, he too will rail. It 
is difficult to give any more satisfactory ex- 
planation of his conduct, difficult in any case 
like this to fathom the depths even of a single 
human spirit ; but explain it as you may, it 
was one drop added to the cup of bitterness 
which our Lord that day took into his hands, 
and drunk to the very dregs, that not only 


208 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


were his enemies permitted to do with him 
what they would, hut the very criminal who 
is crucified by his side, deems himself entitled 
to cast such reproachful sayings in his teeth. 

But he is not suffered to rail at J esus unre- 
buked, and the rebuke comes most appro- 
priately from his brother malefactor, who 
turning upon him says, “ Dost not thou fear 
God, seeing thou art in the same condemna- 
tion ?” “ Dost not thou fear God ?” — he does 

not need to say, Dost thou not fear man ? for 
man has already done all that man can do. 
But, Dost not thou fear God ? He knows 
then that there is a God to fear, a God before 
whose bar he and his brother sufferer are 
soon to appear; a God to whom they shall 
have to give account, not only for every evil 
action that in their past lives they have done, 
but for every idle word that in dying they 
shall speak. He knows it now, he feels it 
now, — had he known and felt it sooner, it 
might have saved him from hanging on that 
cross, — that over and above the condemnation 
of man which he had so lightly thought of, 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


209 


and so fearlessly had braved, there is another 
and weightier condemnation, even that of the 
great God, into whose hands, as a God of 
judgment, it is a fearful thing for the impeni- 
tent to fall. 

tc And we indeed justly.” No questioning 
of the proof, no quarrelling with the law, no 
reproaching of the judge. He neither thinks 
that his crime was less heinous than the law 
made it, nor his punishment greater than the 
crime deserved. Nor do you hear from this 
man s lips what you so often hear from men 
placed in like circumstances, the complaint 
that he had been taken, and he must die, 
whilst so many others, greater criminals than 
himself, are suffered to go at large unpun- 
ished. At once and unreservedly he acknow- 
ledges the justice of the sentence, and in so 
doing, shows a spirit penetrated with a sense 
of guilt. And not only is he thoroughly con- 
vinced of his own guilt, he is as thoroughly 
convinced of Christ’s innocence. “We indeed 
justly” — for we receive the due reward of our 
deeds — “ but this man hath done nothing 


210 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


amiss.” Little as he may have seen or 
known before of Jesus, what he had wit- 
nessed had entirely convinced him that His 
was a case of unmerited and unprovoked per- 
secution ; that he was an innocent man whom 
these Jews, to gratify their own spleen, to 
avenge themselves in their own ignoble quar- 
rel with him, were hounding to the death. 

But he goes much further than to give ex- 
pression merely to his conviction of Christ’s 
innocence, — and it is here we touch upon the 
spiritual marvels of this extraordinary inci- 
dent. Turning from speaking to his brother 
malefactor, fixing his eye upon, and address- 
ing himself to Jesus, as he hangs upon the 
neighboring cross, he says, “ Lord, remember 
me when thou comest into thy kingdom.” 
How came he, at such a time, and in such 
circumstances, to call Jesus Lord ? how came 
he to believe in the coming of his kingdom ? 
It is going the utmost length to which suppo- 
sition can be carried, to imagine that he had 
never met with Jesus till he had met him 
that morning to be led out in company with 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


211 


him to Calvary. He saw the daughters of 
Jerusalem weeping by the way ; he heard 
those words of Jesus which told of the speak- 
er’s having power to withdraw the veil which 
hides the future ; he had seen and read the 
title nailed above the Saviour’s head, pro- 
claiming him to be the King of the Jews ; 
from the lips of the passers-by, of the Chief 
Priests, the elders, the soldiers, he had gath- 
ered that this Jesus, now dying by his side, 
had saved others from that very death he is 
himself about to die, had professed a supreme 
trust in God, had claimed to be the Christ, 
the Chosen, the Son of God, and he had seen 
and heard enough to satisfy him that all 
which Jesus had claimed to be he truly was. 
Such were some of the materials put by Di- 
vine Providence into this man’s hands whereon 
to build his faith ; such the broken fragments 
of the truth loosely scattered in his way. He 
takes them up, collects, combines ; the En- 
lightening Spirit shines upon the evidence 
thus afforded, shines in upon his quickened 
soul; and there brightly dawns upon his 


212 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


spirit the sublime belief that in that strange 
sufferer by his side he sees the long-promised 
Messiah, the Saviour of mankind, the Son and 
equal of the Father, who now, at the very 
time that his mind has opened to a sense of 
his great iniquity, and he stands trembling on 
the brink of eternity, reveals himself as so 
near at hand, so easy of access. His faith, 
thus quickly formed, goes forth into instant 
exercise, and, turning to Jesus, he breathes 
into his convenient ear the simple but ardent 
prayer, “ Lord, remember me when thou com- 
est into thy kingdom.” 

The hostile multitude around are looking 
forward to Christ’s approaching death, as to 
that decisive event which shall at once, and 
for ever, scatter to the winds all the idle 
rumors that have been rife about him; all 
his vain pretensions to the Messiahship. The 
faith of Christ’s own immediate followers is 
ready to give way before that same event ; 
they bury it in his grave, and have only to 
say of him afterwards, “ We hoped that it 
had been he that should have redeemed 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


213 


Israel.” Yet here amid the triumph of ene- 
mies, and the failure of the faith of friends, 
is one who, conquering all the difficulties that 
sense opposes to its recognition, discerns, 
even through the dark envelope which covers 
it, the hidden glory of the Redeemer, and 
openly hails him as his Lord and King. Mar- 
vellous, indeed, the faith in our Lord’s di- 
vinity which sprung up so suddenly in such 
an unlikely region; which shone out so 
brightly in the very midnight of the world’s 
unbelief. Are we wrong in saying that, at 
the particular moment when that testimony 
to Christ’s divinity was borne, there was not 
another full believer in that divinity but this 
dying thief ? If so, was it not a fitting thing, 
that he who was never to be left without a 
witness, now when there was but one witness 
left, should have had this solitary testimony 
given to his divinity at the very time when it 
was passing into almost total eclipse; so 
nearly wholly shrouded from mortal vision ? 
There were many to call him Lord when he 
rose triumphant from the tomb ; there is but 


214 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


one to call him Lord as he hangs dying on the 
cross. 

But let us look upon the prayer of the 
dying thief not only as a public testimony to 
the kingly character and prerogative of Jesus, 
but as the prayer of individual, appropriating 
faith; the earnest, hopeful, trustful applica- 
tion of a dying sinner to a dying Saviour. 
His ideas of Christ’s character and office 
may have been obscure ; the nature of that 
kingdom into possession of which he was 
about to enter, he may have but imperfectly 
understood. He knew it, however, to be a 
spiritual kingdom; he felt that individually 
he had forfeited his right of admission to its 
privileges and its joys; he believed that it 
lay with Jesus to admit him into that king- 
dom. Not with a spirit void of apprehension, 
may he have made his last appeal. It may 
have seemed to him a very doubtful thing, 
whether, when relieved from the sharp pains 
of crucifixion, the suffering over, and the 
throne of the kingdom reached, Jesus would 
think of him amid the splendors and the joys 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


215 


of his new kingly state. Doubts of a kindred 
character have often haunted the hearts of 
the penitent, the hearts of the best and the 
holiest ; but there were two things of which 
he had no doubt, that Jesus could save him if 
he would, and if he did not, he should perish. 
And it is out of these two simple elements 
that genuine faith is always formed, a deep, 
pervading, subduing consciousness of our un- 
worthiness, a simple and entire trust in 
Christ. 

It has been often and well said, that whilst 
this one instance of faith in Jesus formed at 
the eleventh hour is recorded in the New 
Testament, in order that none, even to the 
last moment of their being, should despair, — 
there is but this one instance, that none may 
presume upon a death-bed repentance. And 
even this instance teaches most impressively 
that the faith which justifies always sanc- 
tifies ; that the faith which brings forgiveness 
and opens the gates of Paradise to the dying 
sinner carries with it a renovating power; 
that the faith which conveys the title, works 


216 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


at the same time the meetness for the hea- 
venly inheritance. Let a man die that hour 
in which he truly and cordially believes, that 
hour his passage into the heavenly kingdom 
is made secure ; but let a window be opened 
that hour into his soul, let us see into all the 
secrets thereof, and we shall discover that 
morally and spiritually there has been a 
change in inward character corresponding to 
the change in legal standing or relationship 
with God. It was so with this dying thief. 
True, we have but a short period of his life 
before us, and in that period only two short 
sayings to go upon; happily, however, say- 
ings of such a kind, and spoken in such cir- 
cumstances, as to preclude all doubt of their 
entire honesty and truthfulness ; and what do 
they reveal of the condition of that man’s 
mind and heart ? What tenderness of con- 
science is here ; what deep reverence for God ; 
what devout submission to the divine will ; 
what entire relinquishment of all personal 
grounds of confidence before God; what a 
vivid realizing of the world of spirits ; what 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


217 


a humble trust in Jesus; what a zeal for the 
Saviour’s honor ; what an indignation at the 
unworthy treatment he was receiving ? May 
we not take that catalogue of the fruits of 
genuine repentance which an apostle has 
drawn up for us, and applying it here, say of 
this man’s repentance, — Behold what careful- 
ness it wrought in him ; yea, what clearing 
of himself ; yea, what indignation ; yea, what 
fear ; yea, what vehement desire ; yea, what 
zeal ; yea, what revenge ! In all things he 
approved himself to be a changed man, in the 
desires and dispositions and purposes of his 
heart. The belief has been expressed, that 
in all the earth there was not at that particu- 
lar moment such a believer in the Lord’s 
divinity as he ; would it be going too far to 
couple with that belief this other, that in all 
the earth, and at that moment, there was not 
another man inwardly riper and readier for 
entrance into Paradise ? 

“ Lord, remember me when thou comest 
into thy kingdom.” Loud and angry voices 

have for hours been ringing in the vexed ear 
10 


218 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


of Jesus, — voices whose blasphemy and inhu- 
manity wounded him far more than the mere 
personal antipathy they breathed. Amid 
these harsh and grating sounds, how new, how 
welcome, how grateful, this soft and gentle 
utterance of desire, and trust, and love ! It 
dropped like a cordial upon the fainting spirit 
of our Lord, the only halm that earth came 
forth to lay upon his wounded spirit. Let 
us, too, he grateful for that one soothing word 
addressed to the dying Jesus, and wherever 
the gospel is declared let these words which 
that man spake he repeated in memorial of 
him. 

“ Lord, remember me when thou comest 
into thy kingdom.” He will not ask to be 
remembered now ; he will not break in upon 
this season of his Lord’s hitter anguish. He 
only asks that, when the sharp pains of his 
passion shall he over, the passage made, and 
the throne of the kingdom won, Jesus will, in 
his great mercy, then think of him. Jesus 
will let him know that he does not need to 
wait so long ; he will let him know that the 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


219 


Son of man hath power, even on earth, to 
forgive sin ; that the hour never cometh when 
his ear is so heavy that it can not hear, his 
hand so shortened that it can not save ; and 
the prayer has scarce been offered when the 
answer comes, “ Yerily, I say unto thee, To- 
day shalt thou be with me in paradise.” 

The lips may have trembled that spake 
these words ; soft and low may have been the 
tone in which they were uttered ; but they 
were words of power, — words which only one 
Being who ever wore human form, could have 
spoken. His divinity is acknowledged : the 
moment it is so, it breaks forth into bright 
and beautiful manifestation. The hidden glory 
bursts through the dark cloud that veiled it, 
and, in all his omnipotence to save, Jesus 
stands revealed. What a rebuke to his cru- 
cifiers ! They may strip his mortal body of 
its outward raiment, which these soldiers may 
divide among them as they please ; his hu- 
man soul they may strip of its outer garment 
of the flesh, and send it forth unclothed into 
the world of spirits. But his kingly right to 


220 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


dispense the royal gift of pardon, his power 
to save, can they strip him of that ? Nay, 
little as they know it, they are helping to 
clothe him with that power, at the very time 
when they think they are laying all his kingly 
pretensions in the dust. He will not do what 
they had so often in derision asked him that 
day to do ; — he will not come down from the 
cross ; — he will not give that proof of his 
divinity ; he will not put forth his almighty 
power by exerting it upon the world of mat- 
ter. But on this very cross he will give a 
higher proof of his divinity : he will exert 
that power, not over the world of matter, but 
over the world of spirits, by stretching forth 
his hand and delivering a soul from death, 
and carrying it with him that day into para- 
dise. 

“ Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou 
be with me in paradise.” Jesus would not 
rise from the sepulchre alone ; he would have 
others rise along with him. And so, even as 
he dies, the earthquake does its allotted work, 
work so strange for an earthquake to do, — it 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


221 


opens not a new grave for the living, it opens 
the old graves of the dead ; and as the third 
morning dawns, from the opened graves the 
bodies of the saints arise with the rising body 
of the Lord, — types and pledges of the gen- 
eral resurrection of the dead, verifying, by 
their appearance in the Holy City, the words 
of ancient prophecy : “ Thy dead men shall 
live, together with my dead body shall they 
arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the 
dust ; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, 
and the earth shall cast out her dead.” And 
as Jesus would not rise from the sepulchre 
alone, so neither will he enter Paradise alone. 
He will carry one companion spirit with him 
to the place of the blessed ; thus early giving 
proof of his having died upon that cross that 
others through his death might live, and live 
for ever. See, then, in the ransomed spirit 
borne that day to Paradise, the primal trophy 
of the power of the uplifted cross of Jesus ! 
What saved this penitent thief? No water of 
baptism w T as ever sprinkled upon him ; at no 
table of communion did he ever sit; of the 


222 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


virtue said to lie in sacramental rites he knew 
nothing. It was a simple believing look of a 
dying sinner upon a dying Saviour that did it. 
And that sight has lost nothing of its power. 
Too many, alas ! have passed, are still passing 
by that spectacle of Jesus upon the cross ; 
going, one to his farm, another to his mer- 
chandise, and not suffering it to make its due 
impression on their hearts ; but thousands 
upon thousands of the human race — we bless 
God for this — have gazed upon it with a look 
kindred to that of the dying thief, and have 
felt it exert upon them a kindred power. 
Around it, once more, let me ask you all to 
gather. Many here, I trust, as they look at 
it, can say, with adoring gratitude, He loved 
me; he gave himself for me ; he was wounded 
for my transgression, he was bruised for mine 
iniquity ; lie is all my salvation, he is all my 
desire. Some may not be able to go so far ; 
yet there is one step that all of us, who are in 
any degree alive to our obligations to redeem- 
ing love, can take — one prayer that we all 
may offer ; and surely, if that petition got so 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


223 


ready audience when addressed to Jesus in 
the midst of his dying agonies, with certain 
hope of not less favorable audience may we 
take it up, and shaping it to meet our case, 
may say, Now that thou hast gone into thy 
kingdom, 0 Lord, remember me. 

Yet once more let the words of our Lord 
be repeated, “ To-day shalt thou be with me 
in paradise.” But where this Paradise ; what 
this Paradise ? We can say, in answer to 
these questions, that with this heavenly Pa- 
radise into which the redeemed at death do 
enter, the ancient, the earthly Paradise is not 
fit to be compared. In the one, the direct 
intercourse with God was but occasional ; in 
the other it shall be constant. In the one, 
the Deity was known only as he revealed 
himself in the works of creation and in the 
ways of his providence ; in the other, it will 
be as the God of our redemption, the God 
and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus, 
that he will be recognised, adored, obeyed — 
all the higher moral attributes of his nature 
shining forth in harmonious and illustrious 


224 


THE PENITEKT THIEF. 


display. Into the earthly Paradise the 
Tempter entered ; from the heavenly he will 
he shut out. From the earthly Paradise sad 
exiles once were driven; from the heavenly 
we shall go no more out for ever. Still, how- 
ever, after all such imperfect and unsatisfying 
comparisons, the questions return upon us, 
Where, and what is this Paradise of the re- 
deemed ? Our simplest and our best an- 
swers to those questions perhaps are these — 
Where is Paradise? wherever Jesus is. What 
is Paradise ? to he for ever with, and to be 
fully like, our Lord. We know — for God has 
told us so, of that Paradise of the redeemed — 
that it is a land of perfect light ; the day has 
dawned there; the shadows have for ever 
fled away. It is a land of perfect blessed- 
ness ; no tears fall there ; no sighs rise 
there; up to the measure of its capacity, 
each spirit filled with a pure never-ending 
joy. It is a land of perfect holiness ; no- 
thing that defileth shall enter there, neither 
whatsoever loveth or maketh a lie. But what 
gives to that land its light, its joy, its holi- 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


225 


ness in the sight of the redeemed ? it is the 
presence of Jesus. If there he no night 
there, it is because the Lamb is the light of 
that place ; if there be no tears there, it is 
because from every eye his hand has wiped 
off every tear. The holiness that reigneth 
there is a holiness caught from the seeing him 
as he is. And trace the tide of joy that cir- 
culates through the hosts of the blessed to its 
fountain-head, you will find it within that 
throne on which the Lamb that once was slain 
is sitting. To be with Jesus, to be like Jesus, 
to love and serve him purely, deeply, unfail- 
ingly, unfalteringly — that is the Christian’s 
heaven. 

I love, says one, to think of heaven; and 
as I repeat the words, they will find an echo 
in each Christian heart : — 

“ I love to think of heaven ; its cloudless light, 

Its tearless joys, its recognitions, and its fellowships 
Of love and joy unending; but when my mind anticipates 
The sight of G-od incarnate, wearing on his hands 
And feet and side marks of the wounds 
Which he for me on Calvary endured, 

All heaven beside is swallowed up in this ; 

And he who was my hope of heaven below 
Becomes the glory of my heaven above.” 

10 * 


226 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


Yet once again let the memorable words ot 
onr Lord be repeated, “ To-day shalt thon be 
with me in paradise.” What a day to that 
dying man ! How strange the contrast be- 
tween its opening and its close, its morning 
and its night ! Its morning saw him a cul- 
prit condemned before the bar of earthly 
judgment; before evening shadowed the Hill 
of Zion, he stood accepted at the bar of hea- 
ven. The morning saw him led out through 
an earthly city’s gates in company with one 
who was hooted at by the crowd that gathered 
round him; before night fell upon Jerusalem, 
the gates of another city, even the heavenly, 
were lifted up, and he went up through them 
in company with one around whom all the 
hosts of heaven were bowing down, as he 
passed on to take his place beside the Father 
on his everlasting throne. Humblest believer 
in the Saviour, a like marvellous contrast is 
in store for you. This hour, it may be, weak 
and burdened, tossing on the bed of agony, 
in that darkened chamber of stifled sobs and 
drooping tears ; the next hour, up and away 


THE PENITENT THIEF. 


227 


in the Paradise of God, mingling with the 
spirits of the just made perfect, renewing 
death-broken friendships, gazing on the un- 
veiled glories of the Lamb. Be thou then 
but faithful unto death ; struggle on for a few 
more of those numbered days, or months, or 
years, and on that day of your departure 
hence, in his name I have to say it to 
you, Verily, thou too shalt be with him in 
Paradise. 


IX. 

$lt t potter # f m fprod* 

The last sight we got of the disciple whom 
Jesus loved was when he and Peter entered 
together into the Hall of the High Priest. 
Silent and in the shade, he escaped the scru- 
tiny that his rash companion drew upon him- 
self. Of the sad scene that ensued, J ohn was 
the sorrowful witness. He saw the Lord turn 
and look upon Peter ; he saw Peter turn and 
leave the hall. It is not likely that he fol- 
lowed him. A stronger attraction kept him 
where he was. He waited to see what the 
issue of these strange proceedings should he ; 
waited till he heard the judgment of the San- 
hedrim given ; waited till he saw the weak 
and sorely-badgered Governor at last give 


* 1 John xix 25-27. 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


229 


way ; waited perhaps till the preparations for 
the crucifixion had commenced. Then may 
he have gone in haste into the city ; gone to 
seek out those who, he knew, would be most 
interested to hear; especially to seek out and 
to comfort her upon whose wounded heart the 
burden of these terrible tidings would fall 
most heavily. Most likely it was from the 
lips of the beloved disciple that Mary first 
heard that morning of the fate which awaited 
Jesus. But where and when did she first see 
him ? Not in the palace of the High Priest ; 
not in the Judgment Hall of Pilate. Al- 
though she had got the tidings soon enough 
to be there, these were not places for such a 
visitant. Nor was she one of those daugh- 
ters of Jerusalem that lamented and bewailed 
him by the way. The first sight she gets of 
him is when, mocked by the soldiers, derided 
by the passers-by, insulted by the Chief 
Priests, he hangs upon the cross. She has 
her own sister Mary with her, and that other 
faithful Mary of Magdala, with John beside 
them, making up that little group, who, with 


230 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


feelings so different from those of all the 
others, gaze upon the scene. 

The prayer for his crucifiers has been 
offered. The penitent thief has heard the 
declaration that opens to him that day the 
gates of Paradise, when the eye of the Cruci- 
fied, wandering over the motley crowd, fixes 
upon that little group standing, quietly but 
sadly, near enough to be spoken to. John is 
addressing some word, or doing some act of 
kindness to Mary. They are at least so close 
to one another, that though Jesus names 
neither, neither can mistake of whom and to 
whom he speaks, as, bending a tender look 
upon them, he says, “ Woman, behold thy 
son !” “ Son, behold thy mother !” John 

acts at once on the direction given, and with- 
draws Mary from the spot, and takes her to 
his own home in Jerusalem. Amid the dark 
and tumultuous, solemn and awful incidents 
of the crucifixion, this incident has so much 
of peaceful repose that we feel tempted to 
dwell upon it. At once, and very naturally, 
it suggests to us a review of the previous re- 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


231 


iationship and intercourse between Mary and 
her mysterious Son. We cannot, indeed, 
rightly appreciate our Lord’s notice of her 
from the cross without taking it in connexion 
with that relationship and intercourse. 

The angelic annunciation, the salutation of 
Elizabeth, the visits of the Bethlehem shep- 
herds and the Eastern Magi, had all prepared 
Mary to see, in her first-born Son, One greater 
than the children of men. All those say- 
ings — about his greatness and glory, his being 
called the Son of the Highest, his sitting upon 
the throne of David his father, his reigning 
over the house of Jacob for ever — she kept 
and pondered in her heart, wondering exceed- 
ingly what manner of man that child of hers 
should be, in whom those sayings should be 
fulfilled. As she listened to all those prophe- 
cies of his future greatness, by which his 
birth was foretold and celebrated, what bright 
and glowing anticipations must have filled 
Mary’s heart ! One discordant word alone at 
this time fell upon her ear, one saying differ- 
ing from all the rest, the meaning of which 


232 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 

she could not understand. “This child/’ said 
the aged Simeon, as he took up the babe into 
his arms at his presentation within the Tem- 
ple, — “ this child is set for the fall and rising 
again of many in Israel, and for a sign that 
shall be spoken against. Yea, added the 
aged prophet, as he looked sadly and sym- 
pathizingly at Mary, “ a sword shall pierce 
through thy own soul also.” Was it to tem- 
per her new-born joy ; was it to teach her to 
mingle some apprehension with her hopes ; 
was it to prepare and fortify her for the actual 
future that lay before her — so different from 
the imagined one — that these words were 
spoken? Beyond exciting a fresh wonder 
and perplexity, they could, however, have 
had but little effect on Mary at the time. She 
did not, she could not understand them then ; 
therefore, with those bright and joyous anti- 
cipations still within her heart, she retired to 
Nazareth. The child grew, the Evangelist 
tells us, waxed strong in spirit, was filled 
with wisdom, the grace of God was upon him ; 
but beyond that gentleness which nothing 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


233 


coulc ruffle, that meekness which nothing 
could provoke, that wisdom which was daily 
deepening and widening, giving ever new and 
more wonderful, yet ever natural and child- 
like exhibitions of itself, that dutiful submis- 
sion to his reputed parents, that love to all 
around him upon earth, that deeper love to 
his Father in heaven, — beyond that rare and 
unexampled assemblage of all the virtues 
and graces by which a human childhood could 
be adorned, there was nothing outwardly to 
distinguish him from any child of his own age, 
nothing outwardly to mark him out as the 
heir of such a glorious destiny. 

Twelve years of that childhood pass. Je- 
sus has been to Mary so like what any other 
son might have been to his mother, that, un- 
conscious of any difference, she assumes and 
exercises over him all ordinary maternal 
rights. But now, again, just as it was with 
that speech of Simeon among the other 
prophecies that heralded the Redeemer’s 
birth, so is it with an act and speech of 
Christ himself among the quiet incidents 


234 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


out of which, for thirty years, his life ac 
Nazareth was made up. When twelve years 
old, they take Jesus up to Jerusalem, the 
days of the festival are fulfilled, the village 
company to which Jesus and his family were 
attached, leave the Holy City on their return. 
Joseph and Mary never for a moment doubt 
that, acting with his accustomed wisdom and 
dutifulness, their son will be with the other 
youths from Nazareth and its neighborhood, 
along with whom he had made the journey up 
to the Holy City. Not till the usual resting- 
place for the night is reached do they miss 
him. Something must have happened to hin- 
der him from joining the company at Jeru- 
salem. Full of anxiety, Joseph and Mary 
return into the city. Three days are spent 
in the sorrowful search. At last they find 
him, sitting quietly among the doctors, as if 
the Temple were his home. Imagine Mary’s 
feelings at this sight. No accident, then, had 
happened to him ; no restraint had been laid 
upon him. It had been voluntarily and de- 
liberately that her son had remained thus 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


235 


behind for four days after her departure. 
Never before had Jesus acted in such a way, 
never said or done anything fitted to give 
her pain. Never before had she occasion to 
reproach or rebuke him, but now, in her sur- 
prise and grief, she cannot help speaking to 
him as she had never done before. “ Son,” 
said she, when at last she found him, — 
“ Son, why hast thou dealt thus with us ? 
Thy father and I have sought thee sorrow- 
ing.” Now, mark the Son’s reply when 
spoken to as if he had been forgetful of the 
duty that a child owes to his parents. Mary 
had called him Son; he does not call her 
Mother ; he never does, — never in any con- 
versation related in the Gospels. Mary had 
spoken of Joseph as his father; he nowise 
recognizes that relationship. The full con- 
sciousness of another, higher Sonship than 
that to Mary has entered his youthful heart ; 
and, under the inspiration of this conscious- 
ness, his only reply to the maternal appeal is, 
“ How is it that ye sought me ? wist ye not 
that I must be about my Father’s busi- 


236 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


ness ?” — a very strange and altogether un- 
expected answer; one which, we are dis- 
tinctly told, neither Mary nor Joseph under- 
stood. It offered no explanation or excuse 
for his conduct. It denied all need for any 
such explanation or excuse. In the matter 
of his heavenly Father’s business, it repu- 
diated their interference. Mary had never 
heard her own or Joseph’s authority over him 
questioned by Jesus. Had this visit to Jeru- 
salem weakened in his heart the sense of sub- 
jection to them ? Was he going to throw it 
off? Will he refuse to accompany them ? 
Must he still continue to be thus engaged 
about his Father’s business ? No ! Having 
said thus much, to teach them that he knew 
how special his earthly relationship to them 
was, he rose, he left the temple, and returning 
with them to Nazareth, w T as subject to them 
as before, yet not without having deposited 
another seed of wonder in Mary’s heart, — - 
wonder as to what that other Father’s busi- 
ness was, with her son’s mode of doing which 
she, as his mother, must not interfere. 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 237 


Jesus is, as before, Mary’s dutiful and sub- 
missive Son. Joseph dies, and he, who had 
been sharer of his reputed father’s earthly 
labors, becomes perhaps the chief support and 
solace of his mother in her widowhood. 
Eighteen years go past. Jesus leaves his 
home at Nazareth, alone, for none of his own 
family believe in him. He presents himself 
on the banks of the Jordan, and asks baptism 
at the hands of John. The sign from heaven 
is given ; the voice from heaven is heard ; the 
Baptist points to him as the Lamb of God. 
Philip hails him as the Messiah promised to 
the fathers. Nathanael recognizes him as the 
Son of God, the King of Israel. All this is 
told to Mary. A few weeks later her Son 
returns, and finds her at the marriage-feast at 
Cana ; returns now with public vouchers of 
his Messiahship, and with five followers, who 
acknowledge him as their Master. Once 
more, as at his birth, the hopes of Mary’s 
heart rise high. It is at the house of a friend 
— of a near relative, it has been conjectured — • 
that this marriage-feast is held. The guests, 


238 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 

swelled by Christ’s disciples, are more turner- 
ous than had been anticipated. The wine 
provided fails. If her Son be indeed that 
great Prophet who is to appear, might he not 
take this public opportunity of partially, at 
least, revealing himself? Might he not inter- 
fere to shield this family from discredit ? 
Might he not, with the wine that still re- 
mained, do something like to what Elijah had 
done with the cruse of oil and the barrel of 
meal ? Filled with such hopes, she calls his 
attention to the deficiency, trusting that he 
may possibly, in his new character and office, 
remove it. “ She saith to him, They have no 
wine. Jesus saith to her, Woman, what have 
I to do with thee ? (or, what hast thou to do 
with me ?) mine hour is not yet come.” 
Soften it as we may, relieve it from all that 
may seem disrespectful, there was discourage- 
ment and reproof in this reply. Presuming 
upon her motherly relationship, on the privi- 
leges that her thirty years of ma ernal control 
have given her, Mary ventures to suggest, and 
she does it in the most delicate manner, what 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


239 


nis course of action might be, now that he 
enters upon the public walk of the great 
Prophet. Upon all such interference on her 
part, an instant, gentle, but firm check must 
be imposed. Mary must be taught the limits 
of that influence and authority which her 
earthly relationship to him had hitherto per- 
mitted her to exercise. She must be taught 
that in the new and higher path upon which 
he was now about to enter, that motherly re- 
lationship gave her no place nor right to 
direct or to control. 

Mary felt and acted upon the reproof. She 
never afterwards, at least that we know of, 
in any way obtruded herself. In the history 
of our Lord’s three years’ ministry, she never 
once appears in direct intercourse with her 
Son. She may sometimes have been with 
him in his many circuits of Galilee, but you 
will search in vain for her name among the 
women who accompanied him, and who minis- 
tered to him. Between the words spoken to 
her at Cana, and those addressed to her from 
the cross, not another word, addressed by 


240 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 

Jesus to his mother, is recorded in the Gos- 
pels. True, indeed, he speaks of her ; and 
in such instances what was said seems to have 
been intended to moderate in the minds of his 
hearers their estimate of her position, as his 
mother. From the outskirts of a crowd that 
had gathered round him as he taught, the 
message was once sent in to him, “ Behold, 
thy mother and thy brothers stand without, 
desiring to speak with thee.” What they 
wanted with him, we do not know : it was on 
no friendly errand that his brothers came ; 
they disliked his public preaching on the hill- 
sides to the multitude ; they thought him be- 
side himself. They expected, on this occa- 
sion, that so soon as he got their message, he 
would give up the work in which he was en- 
gaged, and come to them, — that he would feel 
that his mother and they had a claim upon his 
attention, superior to that of the motley com- 
pany that was pressing in upon him. It was 
a case in many respects like that in the Tem- 
ple, of a competition between two kinds or 
classes of obligations. Yery striking was 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


241 


the way in which Jesus in this instance acted. 
As soon as he heard the message, he ex 
claimed, “ Who is my mother or my breth- 
ren ?” Then, looking around, he stretches 
forth his hands to his disciples (and it is but 
rarely that any gesture of our Lord is chron- 
icled in the Gospel story), and said, “ Behold 
my mother and my brethren ; for whosoever 
shall do the will of my Father which is in 
heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, 
and mother.” Another time, as he was speak- 
ing with great power and effect, one of his 
hearers, struck with admiration, broke forth 
with the exclamation, u Blessed is the womb 
that bare thee, and the paps that gave thee 
suck !” “ Yea,” said Jesus, checking in- 

stantly and emphatically that spirit which had 
prompted the exclamation , — u yea, rather 
blessed is he that heareth the word of God, 
and doeth it.” 

Mary was highly favored. With Gabriel 
and with all generations of our race, we are 
prepared to call her blessed. We. are pre- 
pared to render all due honor to that relation- 
ll 


242 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


ship in which she stood to the Redeemer of 
mankind. Among all the earthly distinctions 
and dignities that could have been bestowed 
upon a woman, the very greatest, we believe, 
was that which was thus conferred on Mary. 
And to the reverential regard which this rela- 
tionship demands, we are prepared to add the 
still higher regard due to her genuine mod- 
esty, her simple faith. Nor are we sure hut 
that, in the depth of our recoil from the su- 
perstitious reverence that has gathered round 
her name, we have overlooked and failed to 
do full justice to the simplicity, the beauty, 
the retiringness of that piety which makes 
her among the pious women of the Gospels 
wha,t John was among the apostles of our 
Lord. But when asked to worship her, to 
pray to her as the mother of the Lord, to en- 
treat that she will exert her influence with 
her Divine Son, is it possible to overlook that 
treatment which she met with at our Lord’s 
own hands when here upon earth ; is it pos- 
sible to put away from us the thought that, 
in that very treatment, he was prophetically 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


243 


uttering his own solemn protest against any 
such idolatrous magnifying of the position and 
relationship in which it pleased God that she 
should stand to him ? We say this in the 
spirit of no mere ecclesiastical quarrel with 
the worship of the Virgin. We know how 
soon it was that Paganism mingled its super- 
stitions with the simple worship of the Cruci- 
fied ; and we can well, therefore, understand 
how, in virtue of all the gentle and sacred as- 
sociations that linked themselves with her 
name, her character, her peculiar connexion 
with Jesus, Mary should have come to be 
regarded with an idolatrous regard. Nay, 
further, looking back upon those dark ages 
when, under the grinding tread of Northern 
barbarism, the civilization of Southern Eu- 
rope was well-nigh obliterated, we can see a 
beauty, a tenderness,- a power in the worship 
of Mary ; in the prayers and the hymns ad- 
dressed to her, which turned them into a 
softening and civilizing element. Nay, far- 
ther still, were we asked, among all the idola- 
tries that have prevailed upon this idol-loving, 


244 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 

idol-worshipping world of ours, to say which 
one of them it was that touched the finest 
chords of the human heart, awoke the purest 
and tenderest emotions, had the best and 
most humanizing effect, we do not know but 
that we should fix upon this worship of the 
Virgin. But delivered, as we have been, 
from the bondage of the Middle-Age super- 
stitions ; with that narrative in our hands 
which tells us how our Lord himself dealt 
with Mary ; standing as we do, or ought to 
do, in the full light of that great truth, that 
“ there is one God, and one Mediator between 
God and men, the Man Christ Jesus,” — it can 
not but be matter of surprise, that this wor- 
ship of the Virgin should still prevail in so 
many of the enlightened countries of Chris- 
tendom ; suggesting the reflection, how slowly 
it is that the human spirit emancipates itself 
from any natural, long-continued, and fondly 
cherished superstition. 

Keeping now the whole history of Mary’s 
previous connexion with our Lord before our 
eye, and especially their intercourse during 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 245 


the three years of his public ministry, let us 
dwell for a moment or two upon Christ’s re- 
cognition of her from the cross. This affec- 
tionate recognition in his dying agonies, must 
have been peculiarly grateful to Mary. His 
departure from Nazareth, to which he seems 
to have paid only one short visit afterwards ; 
his separation from the members of his own 
family ; his engrossment with the great ob- 
jects of his public life ; the checks he had 
imposed upon her interference; the manner 
in which he had publicly spoken of her ; all 
these must have created something like a feel- 
ing of estrangement in Mary’s breast, as if 
he had ceased to be to her all that he once 
was. How pleasing to her then to learn from 
that look and speech of kindness, that his 
love for her remained unchanged. How sooth- 
ing to her motherly affection to receive this 
last, this parting token of his undying affec- 
tion for her ! She may banish all her fears, 
bury all her suspicions ; that Son of hers, he 
loves her still, loves her as he had ever done ; 
he cannot die without assuring her of that 


246 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 

love. But it is more than a simple expres- 
sion of affection that comes here from the 
Redeemer’s lips. There is a thoughtful care 
for Mary’s future earthly comfort, the secur- 
ing for her the attention of another son, the 
providing for her the shelter of a new home. 
The dying Jesus has present to his thoughts 
the bereaved, the desolate condition in which 
his death will leave his mother ; he will make 
all the provision he can towards alleviating 
her distress ; silver and gold he has none to 
give her, but he has what silver and gold 
could never buy, — a hold and power over the 
heart of one who, if he be well described as 
the disciple whom Jesus loved, might almost 
as aptly be described as the disciple who 
loved Jesus. That hold he will now exercise 
on her behalf. “ Woman, behold thy son !” 
Woman, not mother: he might, upon this 
occasion, have restrained himself from calling 
her so, lest the very mention of her relation- 
ship to him should mark her out to that un- 
friendly crowd, and expose her to their ill- 
treatment. He is but repeating, however, on 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 247 


the cross, the address of the marriage-feast — - 
“ Woman, behold thy son!” Mary, perhaps 
up to that moment, had cherished some hope 
of his deliverance ; but at that word this hope 
gives way ; she is to lose him ; he is to be her 
Son no more ; that tie is to be broken, and a 
new one created in its stead. A better, kinder 
son than John, Jesus could not have provided ; 
but, alas ! Mary feels that he can never fill 
that Son’s place ; still there is a great kind- 
ness in selecting such a substitute. 

To John, no name, no epithet is applied ; 
Jesus simply looks at him and says, “ Behold 
thy mother /” J ohn had already been kind to 
Mary, was at that moment doing what he 
could to comfort her, would have cared for her^ 
though no special charge of this kind had been 
given ; but a son’s place, that son’s place, he 
could not have felt warranted to assume. 
Now, however, when Jesus with his dying 
breath calls upon him to occupy it, he counts 
it as a high honor conferred upon him. He 
undertakes the trust, and proceeds to execute 
it in the promptest and most delicate way. 


248 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


Was he but interpreting aright the look that 
Jesus gave him, or was he only obeying an 
impulse of thoughtful, son-like affection in his 
own breast ? However it was, he saw that 
Mary’s strength was failing, that she was un- 
fit for the closing scene ; he instantly led her 
away to his own home in the city. She was 
not at the cross when the darkness descended ; 
she was not there when the last and bitterest 
agonies were borne. You search for her in 
vain among the women who stood afar off be- 
holding to the last. By John’s kind act of 
instant withdrawal, she was saved what she 
might not have had strength to bear; and 
though that withdrawal was neither prescribed 
nor suggested by our Lord himself, one can 
well imagine with what a grateful look he 
would follow that son as he discharged this 
the first office of his new relationship ; how 
pleased he too would be that a mother’s heart 
was spared the pangs of witnessing that suf- 
fering which drew from him the cry, “My 
God ! my God ! why hast thou forsaken me ?” 
Mary showed the submissiveness of her dis* 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


249 


position in yielding to John’s suggestion, and 
retiring from the cross, and you never see her 
hut once again in the Gospel narrative. 
Neither at the resurrection nor at the ascen- 
sion, nor during the forty days that inter- 
vened between them, is her name mentioned, 
or does she appear. The one and only glance 
we get of her is in the first chapter of the 
Acts of the Apostles, where her name and 
that of our Lord’s brother, who had come 
then to believe on him, are mentioned among 
the hundred and twenty who, after the ascen- 
sion, continued in prayer and supplication, 
waiting for the promise of the Spirit. 

And now, in conclusion, in that love w T hich 
in his latest hours Jesus showed to Mary, let 
us hail the great and perfect example of filial 
affection he has left behind him. In that 
mingling with the broader thoughts of a 
world’s redemption which must then have 
occupied his thoughts, the thoughtful care for 
her earthly comfort, let us see the evidence 
of how essential a part of all true religion it 
is to provide, as God enables us, for those 


250 THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 

whom we leave behind us in this world. Let 
no pretext of other and higher obligations 
weaken within our breasts the sense of our 
obligation to discharge this duty before we 
die. 

From our Saviour’s treatment of Mary let 
us learn, too, to put in their right place, to 
estimate according to their real worth, all 
earthly, all external distinctions. To be the 
mother of our Lord, that raised her above all 
other women, — and we gladly join with all 
vho, upon that ground, would call her blessed ; 
yet would we still more wish to join heart and 
soul in our Lord’s own saying, that “ more 
blessed is he who heareth the word of God, 
and doeth it.” To be the nearest herald, the 
immediate harbinger of Jesus, that raised 
John the Baptist above all the prophets, and 
ranked him among the greatest of the children 
of men. But yet there is another connexion 
with Christ, higher and still more honorable — - 
a connexion in comparison with which the 
closest of mere external or official bonds sink 
into absolute insignifi "ance — that inward, that 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


251 


spiritual, that eternal tie which hinds the 
humble, contrite, trustful spirit to the Re- 
deemer. To be the least in his kingdom, to 
be the least among those who truly love and 
faithfully obey him, is a more enduring, a 
more illustrious distinction than to be the 
highest among those upon whom the honors 
of this world are heaped. And let us bless 
God for it, that this, the highest honor to 
wdiich humanity can be exalted, is one that 
is within the reach of all. It cometh through 
humility and faith and love ; it cometh 
through the weight of our sin being felt, the 
worth of our Redeemer being appreciated. 
It cometh through our becoming as little chil- 
dren, and yielding ourselves up to those 
gracious influences of the Divine Spirit, by 
which alone the proud heart can be humbled, 
and the doubtful heart be assured, and the 
unloving heart be brought to love. It cometh 
through the eye of faith being opened to dis- 
cern the closeness and the reality of the 
unseen world, that world of spirits, whose 
all-engulfing bosom, when a few more^rf' these 


252 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 


numbered years of ours on earth are over, 
shall have received us all. It cometh from 
our giving to all that concerns our spiritual 
state, our spiritual welfare and preparation for 
futurity, that predominance in our regards, 
our affections, our lives, to which their inhe- 
rent, their surpassing worth, entitles them. 
It springs from our caring less for the honor 
that cometh from man, and more for that 
honor which cometh from God only. 

Finally, let us realize those relationships to 
one another established in Christ our Lord, 
which, in their closeness, their blessedness, 
their enduringness, so far outmeasure all the 
other relationships of this human life. Why 
was John selected to take Christ’s place, to 
be a second son to Mary ? Why was Mary 
so specially committed to his charge? She 
had other sons, upon whom the duty natur- 
ally devolved. They, indeed, as yet were 
unbelievers ; and upon that ground might fitly 
have been excluded. But were there not two 
of her own sister’s sons among the twelve ? 
Why pass the sister and the nephews over, 


THE MOTHER OF OUR LORD. 258 


and select John to stand to her in this new 
relationship? It may have been that John 
was better placed than they, as to outward 
circumstances abler to provide a home for the 
bereaved ; hut can we doubt that another and 
still weightier consideration determined the 
Saviour’s choice — the spiritual affinity be- 
tween John and Mary ; his capacity to enter 
into all her sorrows ; his power by sympathy 
to support ? And ties kindred to those which 
bound John and Mary together, do they not 
still bind together those whose hearts have 
been taught to heat in unison, and who have 
been formed to be mutual helps and comforts 
amid the trials and bereavements of life ? 
Thank God for it, if he has given you any 
such support as Mary and John found in each 
other; and rejoice in the belief, that those 
relationships which are grounded on and spring 
out of our oneness in Jesus Christ, partake not 
of the mutability of this earthly scene, but, 
destined to outlive it, are impressed with the 
seal of eternity. 


X. 

Wfxt §whxm mttf tto 

The full, bright sun of an eastern sky lias 
been looking down on what these men are 
doing who have nailed Jesus to the cross, and 
are standing mocking and gibing him. The 
mid-day hour has come ; when suddenly there 
falls a darkness which swallows up the light, 
and hangs a funeral pall around the cross : — 
no darkness of an eclipse — that could not be 
as the moon then stood — no darkness which 
any natural cause whatever can account for. 
As we think of it, many questions rise to 
which no answer can now be given. Did it 
come slowly on, deepening and deepening till 
it reached its point of thickest gloom ? or was 


* Mark xv. 33, 34. 


THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 255 


it, as we incline to believe, as instantaneous 
in its entrance as its exit : at the sixth hour, 
covering all in a moment with its dark mantle ; 
at the ninth hour, in a moment lifting that 
mantle off? Was it total or partial : a dark- 
ness deep as that of moonless, starless mid- 
night, wrapping the cross so thickly round, 
that not the man who stood the nearest to it 
could see aught of the sufferer ? Or was it 
the darkness of a hazy twilight obscuring but 
not wholly concealing, which left the upraised 
form of the Redeemer dimly visible through 
the gloom? Was it local and limited, con- 
fined to Jerusalem or Judea; or did it spread 
over the entire enlightened portion of the 
globe? We cannot tell. We may say of it, 
and say truly, that it was inanimate nature, 
supplying, in her mute elements, that sym- 
pathy with her suffering Lord which was de- 
nied by man. Men gazed rudely on the sight, 
but the sun refused to look on it, hiding his 
face for a season. Men would leave the Cru- 
cified, exposed in shame and nakedness, to 
die ; but an unseen hand was stretched forth 


256 


THE DARKNESS AND 


to draw the drapery of darkness around the 
sufferer, and hide him from vulgar gaze. 

But the truest and deepest significance of 
this darkness is as a type or emblem of the 
horror of that great darkness which at this 
period enveloped the spirit of the Redeemer. 
The outer incidents,* if there were any, of 
those three hours of darkness, remain untold. 
We are left only to believe that its sudden 
descent wrought like a spell upon the actors 
and spectators ; it stopped each wagging head, 
it silenced each gibing tongue ; not a word 
seems to have been spoken, not a thing done ; 
there they stood, or there they lay, with that 
spell upon them, wondering what this dark- 
ness meant. We can easily enough imagine 
what they may have fancied or felt during 
that strange period of suspense ; but who can 
imagine what He was thinking of, how He, 
the Saviour, was feeling in that dread and 
awful interval ? No eye perhaps may have 
pierced the outer darkness that shrouded his 
suffering body ; still less may any human eye 
penetrate that deeper darkness which shrouded 


THE DESERTION. 


257 


his suffering soul. We are left here without 
a single external index ; not a look, a word, 
an act, to tell us what was going on within 
the Redeemer’s spirit, — till the ninth hour 
came, the moment which preceded the rolling 
away of the darkness, and the return of the 
clear shining of the day, and then the only 
sound that strikes the ear is the agonizing 
cry — “ My God, my God ! why hast thou for- 
saken me ?” — a cry wrung, as it were, from 
the sufferer’s lips, when the severe agony of 
his soul has reached its last, its culminating, 
its closing point ; a cry which, revealing some- 
what of the interior of the burdened heart 
from which it springs, leaves still more unre- 
vealed ; a cry which, after we have listened 
to it, and pondered it, and turned it over and 
over again in our thoughts, seems to grow 
darker instead of brighter to our eye, and of 
which we become at last convinced that it 
was the simple, spontaneous, irrepressible, 
outcry of a spirit tried to the last limit 
of endurance ; the expression of what must 


258 


THE DARKNESS AND 


for ever remain to us an indescribable, unfa- 
thomable, unimaginable woe. 

It would strip, indeed, this cry of the suf- 
fering Saviour of all difficulty and mystery, 
could we look upon him as a man, and no- 
thing more ; could we look upon him in dying 
as subject to the same mental and spiritual, 
as well as bodily weakness with any of our- 
selves ; could we believe that such doubts 
and fears as have eclipsed the faith, and dark- 
ened for a time the hopes of other dying men, 
had place within his breast ; could we inter- 
pret this saying as the utterance of a momen- 
tary despondency, a transient despair. We 
are disposed to go the utmost length in attri- 
buting to the humanity of our Lord all the 
sinless frailties of our nature ; and had we 
seen him straggling in agony through the 
tedious death-throes of dissolution, the sink- 
ing body drawing the sinking spirit down 
along with it, and draining it of all its 
strength, — had it been from a spirit enfeebled 
to the uttermost, its very powers of thought 
and apprehension, of faith and feeling, faint- 


THE DESERTION. 


259 


ing ? failing, that this sad lament proceeded, 
we can scarcely tell whether or not it would 
have been inconsistent with a right estimate of 
the humanity of Jesus to attribute to him 
such a momentary oppression under doubt and 
fear as should have forced this exclamation 
from his lips, prompted by his obscured per- 
ception of his personal relationship with the 
Father. 

It stands, however, in the way of our re- 
ceiving any such interpretation of this say- 
ing, that it came from one whose intellect was 
so clear and unclouded that the moment after 
it was uttered he could reflect on all he had 
to say or do in order that the Scripture might 
be fulfilled, and whose bodily powers were so 
far from being reduced to the last extremity 
of weakness, that it was “ with a loud voice,” 
betokening a vigor as yet unexhausted, that 
he uttered the despairing cry. 

Besides, we have only to look back upon 
the few days that preceded the crucifixion, to 
find evidence that there mingled with the suf- 
ferings which Christ endured upon the cross 


260 


THE DARKNESS AND 


an element altogether different from the com- 
mon pains of dying. On one of the last days 
of his teaching in the temple, certain Greeks 
desired to see him. Their earnest request 
sounded to his prophetic ear like the entreaty 
of the entire Gentile w'orld. It threw him 
into a sublime reverie of thought. Bright 
visions of a distant future, when all men 
should he drawn unto him, rose before his 
eye; hut with them the vision of a future 
even then at hand, — of his being lifted up 
upon the cross. A sudden change comes over 
his spirit. He ceases to think of, to speak 
with man. His eye closes upon the crowd 
that stands around. He is alone with the 
Father. A dark cloud wraps his spirit. He 
fears as he enters it. From the bosom of the 
darkness there comes an agitated voice : 
“ Now is my soul troubled ; and what shall I 
say ? Father, save me from this hour : but 
for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, 
glorify thy name — some deep, inward 
trouble of the heart, a shrinking from it, a cry 
for deliverance, a meek submission to the 


THE DESERTION. 


261 


Divine will. You have all these repeated in 
order, and with greater intensity in the Gar- 
den of Gethsemane : “ My soul is exceeding 
sorrowful, even unto death. 0 my Father, if 
it be possible, let this cup pass from me : 
nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” 
Here, once more, there is the agony, the 
shrinking, the petition, the acquiescence. 

What so troubled Jesus in the Temple ? 
what threw him into that bloody sweat in the 
Garden ? what drew from him these strong 
cryings for deliverance ? Can any one be- 
lieve that it was the mere prospect of dying 
upon a cross which thus shook his spirit to 
the very centre ? To believe so, were to de- 
grade him beneath a level to which multitudes 
of his followers have risen. Deaths far more 
formidable, more protracted, more excruciat- 
ing, they have contemplated beforehand with 
unruffled composure, and endured with un- 
shrinking fortitude. Shall the disciple be 
greater than the master ? No ; there was 
something more in that hour for which Jesus 
came into this world, something more in that 


262 


THE DARKNESS AND 


cup which he took into his trembling hands, 
than the mere bitterness of apprehended dis- 
solution. He has himself taught us, by the 
language which he employed, to identify the 
hour and the cup. He has taught us, too, 
that this hour was on him in the Temple ; 
this cup was there raised by him to his lips. 
The same hour was on him in the Garden ; 
of the same cup he there drank large and 
hitter draughts. It was that same hour 
which came upon him on the cross, to run out 
its course during the supernatural darkness ; 
it was that same cup which he took once more 
into his hands, to drain to the very dregs. 
Here also, as in the Temple, in the Garden, 
you have the same features, — the conflict, the 
recoil, the victory. Perhaps the inward 
trouble and agony of his soul reached a some- 
what higher pitch on Calvary than in Geth- 
semane : that hitter cry — “ My God, my 
God ! why hast thou forsaken me ?” — sounds 
to our ear as coming from a profounder depth 
of woe than any into which Jesus had ever 
sunk before ; hut in source and in character 


THE DESERTION. 


263 


the sorrow of the Saviour’s spirit was in each 
of the three instances the same — a purely 
mental or spiritual grief, unconnected in two 
of these cases with any bodily endurance, 
and, in the third, carefully to be distinguished 
from those pains of dissolution with which it 
mingled. 

Whence did that grief arise ? what were 
its elements ? how came it to be so accumu- 
lated and condensed, and to exert such a 
pressure upon the spirit of our Redeemer, as 
to force from him those prayers in the Gar- 
den, this exclamation on the cross ? It was 
because he stood as our great Head and Rep- 
resentative, and suffered in our room and 
stead : “ He was wounded for our transgres- 
sions, he was bruised for our iniquities he 
made “ his soul an offering for sin “ he 
died the just for the unjust, to bring us to 
God.” The testimony of the Scriptures to 
the vicarious, sacrificial, atoning character of 
the sufferings and death of Christ, is clear, 
emphatic, multiform, and unambiguous. But 
when we go beyond the simple statements of 


264 


THE DARKNESS AND 


the Inspired Record, and, admitting the great 
fact of the Atonement, inquire into the how 
and the wherefore of that fact, — resolved to 
accept implicitly all that the Scriptures teach, 
but equally resolved not to go beyond its 
teaching, nor add any theories of our own to 
its simple and impressive lessons, — we feel 
ourselves on the borders of a region, too re- 
mote, too mysterious, for eyes like ours fully 
and accurately to survey. 

Let us, however, that we may catch a dis- 
tant sight of one inner fountain of our Re- 
deemer’s sufferings, approach it by a path 
which, for some distance at least, is not ob- 
scure. It is said in Scripture that Christ 
bore our sins in his own body on the tree ; it 
is said, also, that he bore our griefs, and car- 
ried our sorrows. Our griefs he bore by 
sympathy ; our sorrows he carried by enter- 
ing into them and making them his own. 
That central heart of love and pity opened 
itself, at every point, to all the forms and 
varieties of human woe. Its sympathy stood 
free from all those restraints that lie upon 


THE DESERTION. 


265 


ours. Our ignorance, our selfishness, our 
coldness, our incapacity for more than a few 
intense affections, narrow and weaken the 
sympathy we feel. But he knows all, can 
feel for all ; so that not a pang of grief wrings 
any human bosom but sends an answering 
thrill through the loving, pitying heart of our 
Divine Redeemer. Human sympathy, too, 
deepens, takes a peculiar character, a peculiar 
tenderness, according to the closeness and 
dearness of the tie which binds us to the suf- 
ferer. A mother’s fellow-feeling with a suffer- 
ing child is something very different from 
what any stranger can experience. And it is 
not simply as one of us, as a brother man, 
that Jesus feels for us in our sorrows. It is 
as one who has linked himself to our race, or 
rather has linked our race to him by a tie the 
nature and force of which we are little capa- 
ble of understanding. Only we may say, 
that parent was never bound to child, nor 
child to parent, in a bond so close as that 
which binds Jesus Christ and those whom he 
came to redeem. It would need his own om- 


266 


THE DARKNESS AND 


niscience to fathom the depth and intensity 
imparted to his sympathy by the peculiarity 
of that relationship in which it has pleased 
him to place himself to his own. 

Now, Christ’s is as much the central con- 
science as the central heart of humanity. 
Conceive him entering into a connexion with 
human sin, kindred to that into which he 
enters with human sorrow, realizing to him- 
self, as he only could, its extent, its invet- 
eracy, its malignity : in this way taking on 
him all our sins, and letting the full impres- 
sion of their inherent turpitude, their ruinous 
results, fall upon his spirit, — who shall calcu- 
late for us the bulk and weight of that bur- 
den which might thus come to be borne by 
him? Once, in a Jewish synagogue, he 
looked round upon a small company of men, 
and he was grieved because of the hardness 
of their hearts. Let us imagine that grief 
amplified and intensified to the uttermost by 
our Lord’s taking upon himself the sin of the 
world. Let all the hardness of all men’s 
hearts, all the hard speeches that ungodly 


THE DESERTION. 


267 


sinners have spoken, the ungodly deeds they 
have done ; let all the impurity, and in- 
justice, and cruelty, and profanity, and im- 
piety which have been perpetrated under 
these heavens — of which the enmity and 
malignity which nailed him to the cross might 
he taken as a specimen and index; let all 
that vast accumulation of human iniquity be 
conceived of as- present to the Redeemer’s 
thoughts, appropriated and realized by him as 
the iniquity of those to whom he had linked 
himself by a bond of closest fellowship, of 
undying, unquenchable love ; let all the sins 
of that w r orld he came to save gather in and 
press down upon the pure and holy and loving 
spirit of the man Christ Jesus : — Do we not 
get a dim and distant sight of a fountain of 
woe thus opened within, sufficient to send 
forth waters of bitterness which might well- 
nigh overwhelm his soul, putting his capacity 
to suffer to an extreme trial ? 

Further still, may we not imagine that as 
he made thus the sins of our sinful world his 
own, and thought and dwelt, upon that holi- 


268 


THE DARKNESS AND 


ness of God, upon which they were such ter- 
rible invasions ; the wrath of the Holy One, 
which they had so thoroughly deserved, and 
so deeply had provoked ; the separation from 
God, the banishment from his presence, the 
death they did so righteously entail ; that, in 
the very fulness of that love and sympathy 
which made him identify himself with us men 
for our salvation, the horror of such a dark- 
ness settled over the mind of the Redeemer 
that the face even of his heavenly Father for 
a moment seemed obscured, that its smile 
seemed changed into a frown, that the mo- 
mentary apprehension seized him that in him- 
self that death, that separation from the 
Father, was about to be realized, so that from 
his oppressed, bewildered, faltering manhood, 
there came forth the cry, “ My God, my God ! 
why hast thou forsaken me ?” 

Let us not forget that there was not, indeed 
could not be — the nature of the connexion 
forbade it — any absolute or entire desertion 
of the Son by the Father. “ Therefore,” said 
Jesus, “doth my Father love me, because I 


THE DESERTION. 


269 


lay down my life for the sheep.” Could that 
love he withdrawn from Jesus when he was 
in the very act of laying down his life ? 
“ This,” said the Father, “ is my beloved Son, 
in whom I am well pleased.” Was there ever 
a time at which he was more pleased with 
him than when he was offering himself up in 
that sacrifice so acceptable to God ? Nor does 
the Son ever entirely lose his hold of the 
Father. Even in this moment of amazement 
and oppression it is still to God, as his God, 
that he speaks : “ My God ! my God ! why 
hast thou forsaken me !” It was the sensible 
comfort only of the Divine presence and favor 
which were for the time withdrawn ; the felt 
inflowings of the Divine love which were for 
the time checked. But what a time of agony 
must that have been to him who knew, as none 
other could, what it was to bask in the light 
of his Father’s countenance; who felt, as 
none other could, that his favor indeed was 
life ! On us, — so little do we know or feel 
what it is to be forsaken by God, — the 
thought of it, or sense of it, may make but a 


270 


THE DARKNESS AND 


slight impression, produce but little heartfelt 
misery ; hut to him it was the consummation 
and the concentration of all woe, beyond which 
there was and could be no deeper anguish for 
the soul. 

I have thus presented to you but a single 
side, as it were, of that sorrow unto death 
which rent the bosom of the Redeemer, as he 
was offering himself a sacrifice for us upon 
the cross. Perhaps it is the side which lies 
nearest to us, and is most open to our com- 
prehension. Certainly it is one the looking 
at which believingly is fitted to tell power- 
fully on our consciences and hearts — to make 
us feel the exceeding sinfulness of our sin, 
and set us hopefully and trustfully to struggle 
with the temptations that beset our path. 

In a household which enjoyed all the bene- 
fits of high culture and Christian care, one of 
the children committed a grievous and unex- 
pected fault ; he told a falsehood to cover a 
petty theft; rebuke and punishment were 
administered, carried farther than they had 
ever been before, but without effect. The 


THE DESERTION. 


271 


offender was not awakened to any real or deep 
sorrow for his offence. The boy’s insensibil- 
ity quite overcame his father. Sitting in the 
same room with his obstinate and sullen child, 
he bent his head upon his hands, and, sob- 
bing, burst into a flood of tears. For a mo- 
ment or two the boy looked on in wonder ; he 
then crept gradually nearer and nearer to his 
sobbing parent, and at last got up upon his 
father’s knees, asking, in a low whisper, why 
it was that he was weeping so. He was told 
the reason. It wrought like a spell upon his 
young heart ; the sight of his father suffering 
so bitterly on his account was more than he 
could bear. He flung his little arms around 
his father, and wept along with him. That 
father never needed to correct his child again 
for any like offence. And surely, if, in that 
great sorrow which overwhelmed the spirit of 
our Redeemer on the cross, there mingled, as 
one of its ingredients, a grief like, in origin 
and character, to that which wrung this 
father’s heart, and melted his child to peni- 
tence, the sight and thought of it ought to 


272 


THE DARKNESS AND 


exert a kindred power over those for whom 
Jesus died. 

A younger son is guilty of a great offence 
against his father. His elder brother, in act- 
ing the part of a mediator between the offend- 
ing child and his offended parent, might volun- 
tarily submit to the exact and the full pun- 
ishment which his younger brother had 
deserved, — by doing so might turn away the 
father’s wrath, and earn the title to a brother’s 
gratitude. But what if the offender sees his 
elder brother, at the pure and simple impulse 
of love, melted into a profound and heart- 
breaking grief, yearning over him, weeping 
over him, making on himself a suffering far 
more acute than that which the lash of pa- 
rental discipline might righteously have in- 
flicted on the offender, would not the sight of 
the pain that his conduct had given one who 
loved him so tenderly, tell most powerfully in 
the way of quickening him to a sense of his 
wrong-doing? Transfer this to our Elder 
Brother, the Mediator with our offended 
Father in heaven. The exact punishment 


THE DESERTION. 


273 


which our sin entails — remorse, despair, the 
sting of a torturing conscience, the felt abid- 
ing misery of a soul cut off from the Divine 
favor — Jesus could not literally bear. He 
has, indeed, borne that for us which has satis- 
fied the Divine justice, and been accepted as 
a full and adequate atonement for our trans- 
gression ; but may it not have been that the 
suffering in our room and stead, which was 
accepted of the Father, was part of the suffer- 
ing which our great sin and his great love 
drew down on him , who, by linking himself 
to us by the tie of a common humanity, laid a 
brother’s heart open to such a sorrow for our 
sin as none but the Eternal Son of the Father 
could have endured ? Surely, in the conside- 
ration that it was in such kind of suffering 
with and for our sins that the great Atone- 
ment of the cross, in a measure at least, con- 
sisted, there is one of the most direct and 
powerful of appeals, — one singularly fitted to 
touch, to soften, to subdue. 

I am very conscious how little anything 

which has as yet been said is fitted to throw 
11 


274 THE DARKNESS AND THE DESERTION. 

full or satisfactory light upon that most mys- 
terious of all the mysterious sayings of our 
Lord — the plaintive, lonely, loud, and hitter 
cry which emanated from the cross, which, 
piercing the overhanging darkness, was heard 
w r ith wonder in the heavens. It came out of 
the depth of an anguish that we have no 
plummet in our hand to sound ; and we be- 
come only the more conscious how unfathom- 
able that depth is, by trying it here and 
there with the line of our short-reaching in- 
tellect. Instead of hoping to find the bot- 
tom anywhere, let us pause upon the brink ; 
adoring, wondering, praising that great love 
of our most gracious Saviour, which has a 
height and a depth, a length and a breadth 
ip. it, surpassing all human, all angelic mea- 
surement : — 

“ Oh, never, never canst thou know 

What then for thee the Saviour bore, 

The pangs of that mysterious woe 

Which wrung his bosom’s inmost core. 

YeSj man for man perchance may brave 
The horrors of the yawning grave ; 

And friend for friend, or son for sire, 

Undaunted ana unmoved expire, 

From love, or piety, or pride ; 

But who can die as Jesus died?” 


XI. 

“ it £m$\mU f * 

With the arrival of the ninth hour, the 
outer darkness cleared away, and with it too 
the horrors of that inner darkness, from whose 
troubled bosom the cry at last came forth, 
“ My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me ?” That mental agony, one of whose in- 
gredients — perhaps to us the most intelligible 
— I endeavored last Sunday to describe, had 
been endured. The hour for which he came 
into the world has run its course; the cup 
which with such a trembling hand he had put 
to shrinking lips, has been drunk to its dregs ; 
the powers of darkness have made on him 
their last assault, and been repelled ; the mo- 

* Matt, xxvii. 47-50 • Mark xv. 35-37 ; Luke xxiii. 46 ; John 
xix. 2&-3Q 


276 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


mentary darkness of his Father’s countenance 
has passed away. As the sun of nature dis- 
pels the gloom that for these three hours had 
hung around the scene, and sheds once more 
his illuminating beams upon the cross ; even 
so the light of an answering inward joy comes 
to cheer in death the spirit of our Redeemer. 
It is not in darkness, whether outward or 
inward, — not in darkness, hut in light, in full, 
clear, unclouded light, that Jesus dies. 

The first, however, and immediate effect of 
the lifting from his oppressed and burdened 
heart that load of inward grief which had 
been laid upon it, was a reviving conscious- 
ness of his bodily condition, the awakening of 
the sensation of a burning thirst. Let the 
spirit be thoroughly absorbed by any very 
strong emotion, and the bodily sensations are 
for the time unfelt or overborne, they fail to 
attract notice ; but let the tide of that over- 
whelming emotion retreat, and these sensa- 
tions once more exert their power. In the 
shock of battle, the excited combatant may 
receive his death-wound, and be unconscious 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


277 


of pain. It is when they lay him down in 
quiet to die, that exhausted nature betrays a 
sense of suffering. So it is, after a manner, 
here with Christ. His lips scarce feel their 
parchedness as they utter the cry, “ My God, 
my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?” Too 
full, too agitated, is the soul within, to be 
keenly alive to bodily sensations. But now 
that the relief from inward agony has come, 
the cravings of nature return, and first among 
these the strong desire for something to alle- 
viate the thirst. This thirst, however, so far 
from entirely engrossing his thoughts, serves 
but to suggest to the dying Saviour — and this 
shows, as we before remarked, how cleaflt and 
calm and self-possessed he was to the very 
p ls t — that among all the numerous prophecies 
which had spoken of the time and manner of 
his decease, of his being numbered with trans- 
gressors, of the shaking of heads, and the 
shooting out of tongues, the parting of his 
garments, the casting lots for his vesture, 
there still was one* about their giving him in 


* See Psalm lxix. 


278 


“it is finished; 


his thirst vinegar to drink, which remained to 
to he fulfilled. As being, then, at once the 
natural expression of the feeling of the mo- 
ment, and the means of bringing about the 
fulfilment of that prophecy, “ Jesus said, I 
thirst” 

In saying so, he made an appeal to the sym- 
pathy of his crucifiers, in the belief that they 
would offer him some of that sour wine, or 
vinegar which was the ordinary drink of the 
Homan soldiers. Did Jesus know how that 
appeal would be met and answered ? We 
cannot but believe he did ; and if so, it stands 
out as at once the last act in point of time, 
and one of the lowest in point of degree, of 
that humiliation before men to which it 
pleased him to stoop, that he addressed him- 
self as a petitioner to those who treated his 
petition as they did. Let us try to realize 
what happened around the cross immediately 
after the departure of the three hours’ dark- 
ness. One might have expected that the 
natural awe which that darkness had undoubt- 
edly inspired ; the moaning cry, as from one 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


279 


deserted, that came from the cross, as it was 
rolling away ; the fresh sight of Jesns, upon 
whose pallid features there lingered the traces 
of his terrible agony ; and, last of all, his 
asking of them to drink, — would have con- 
spired to awaken pity, or at least to silence 
scorn. The coming back, however, of the 
light — relieving, perhaps, a dread they might 
have felt that in the darkness Jesus should 
escape or be delivered — seems to have rekin- 
dled that fiendish malignity which now found 
a last and most demoniac way of expressing 
itself. “ Eli! Eli!” — no Jew could possibly 
misunderstand the words, or imagine that they 
were a call to Elias for help. The Roman 
soldiers did not know enough about Elias to 
have fallen on any such interpretation. That 
the words were taken up, played upon by the 
bystanders, and turned into a new instru- 
ment of mockery, shows to what a fiendish 
length of heartless, pitiless contempt and 
scorn such passions as those of these Scribes 
and Pharisees, if unrestrained, will go. One, 
indeed, of those around the cross appears to 


280 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


have been touched with momentary pity, 
perhaps a Roman soldier, who, when he heard 
Jesus say, “I thirst,” and looked upon his 
pale, parched lips, ran and took a stalk of 
hyssop. From what we know of the size of 
the plant, this stalk could not have been much 
above two feet long, but it was long enough 
to reach the lips of Jesus, the feet of a person 
crucified not being ordinarily elevated more 
than a foot or two above the ground. This 
circumstance explains to us how close to the 
crucified the soldiers must have stood ; how 
near many of the outstanding crowd may 
have been ; how natural and easy it was for 
Jesus to speak to Mary and John as he did. 
To that stalk of hyssop the man attached a 
sponge, and, dipping it in the vessel of vine- 
gar, that stood at hand, was putting it to the 
Saviour’s lips, when the mocking crowd cried 
out, “ Let be ; let us see whether Elias will 
come to save him.” This did not stop him 
from giving Jesus, in his thirst, vinegar to 
drink. The ancient prophecy he must uncon- 
sciously fulfil ; but it did serve to half-extin- 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


281 


guish the prompting upon which he had be- 
gun to act, and induce him to take up into his 
own lips, and to repeat the current mockery, 
“ Let us see whether Elias will come to take 
him down.” 

When Jesus had received the vinegar, he 
said, u It is finished /” It does not fall in with 
the character or purpose of these Lectures, 
intended to he as purely as possible exposi- 
tory, to take up this memorable expression of 
our dying Lord, and use it as a text out of 
wdiich a full exposition of the doctrine of the 
Cross might he derived. Rather, as being 
more in accordance with our present design, 
let us endeavor to conceive of, and to enter 
into, as far as it is possible, the spirit and 
meaning of the expression as employed by our 
Lord upon the cross. 

First, then, as coming at this time from the 
Saviour’s lips, it betokens an inward and deep 
sensation of relief, repose ; relief from a 
heavy burden ; repose after a toilsome labor. 
To the bearing of that burden, the endurance 
of that toil, Jesus had long and anxiously 


282 


“it is finished ; 1 


looked forward. From that time, if time it 
may be called, when he undertook the high 
office of the Mediatorship, — from the begin- 
ning, even from everlasting, through the vista 
of the future, the cross of his last agony had 
risen up before his all-seeing eye, as the object 
towards w T hich, notwithstanding the dark 
shadows cast before it, the thought of his 
spirit stretched forward. In what manner 
and with what feeling it was regarded by him 
in the period which preceded his 'incarnation, 
it becomes us not to speak, as we have no 
means of judging; but we can mark how he 
felt regarding it after he became a man. 

In the earlier period of his ministry, Christ 
practised a strict reserve in speaking of his 
death. In spite, however, of that self-imposed 
restraint, broken hints were ever and anon 
dropping from his lips, sounding quite strange 
and enigmatical in the ears to which they 
were addressed. “I have a baptism,” said 
he to his disciples, “ to be baptized with, and 
how am I straitened till it be accomplished !” 

When near the end of his ministry, the 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


283 


necessity for reserve was removed, Jesus 
spoke openly about his coming death, and 
always in such a way as to convey the very 
deepest impression of the profound interest 
with which he himself contemplated before- 
hand that great event. So eagerly did he 
look forward to it, so striking an influence 
had that prospect even upon his outward as- 
pect and movements, that when for the last 
time, he set his face to go up to Jerusalem, 
and all the things that were to happen to him 
there came rushing into his mind, he “ went 
before” the twelve, as if impatient to get for- 
ward. They were amazed, we are told, as he 
did so ; and as they followed him, and gazed 
upon him, they were afraid . The reason of 
this rapid gait and strange expression he re- 
vealed, when he took them apart by the way, 
and told them what his thoughts had been 
dwelling on. There was but one occasion on 
which he could freely and intelligibly speak 
out the sentiments of his heart : it was when 
he stood with Moses and Elias on the mount, 
and there, even when invested with the glories 


284 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


of transfiguration, the decease which he was 
to accomplish at Jerusalem was the one chosen 
topic of discourse. As the time drew near, 
still oftener was that great decease before his 
thoughts; still heavier did its impending 
weight appear to press upon his spirit. It 
was not, it could not he any mere ordinary 
human death that so occupied the thoughts 
of Jesus Christ. We endeavored in our last 
Lecture to make it apparent to you that the 
true, the real sufferings of that death lay in 
another, far deeper region than that to which 
the ordinary pangs of bodily dissolution be- 
long; and we cannot but believe that that 
internal conflict, that inner agony of soul, re- 
served for the last days and hours of our Re- 
deemer’s life, was broken, as it were, into 
parts, distributed between the Temple, the 
Garden, the Cross, for the very purpose of 
making it palpable, even to the eye of the 
ordinary observer, that the sufferings of the 
Redeemer’s soul formed, as has been well 
said, the very soul of his sufferings. And 
when those mysterious sufferings, so long 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


285 


looked forward to, at last were over, the load 
borne and lifted off, with what a deep inward 
feeling of relief, repose, must Jesus have said, 
“ It is finished !” 

Secondly, Connecting this expression with 
what went so immediately before — our Lord’s 
remembrance of all that was needful to be 
done to him and by him in dying, in order 
that the Scriptures might be fulfilled — it may 
reasonably be assumed that he meant thereby 
to declare the final close and completion of 
that long series of types and prophecies of 
his death which crowd the pages of the Old 
Testament Scriptures. In the very number 
and variety of these types and prophecies, 
another attestation meets our eye to the pre- 
eminent importance of that event to which 
they point. If you take the twenty-four hours 
which embrace the last night and day of the 
Redeemer’s life, you will find that more fre- 
quent and more minute pre-intimations of 
what occurred throughout their course are to 
be found in the prophetic pages, than of what 
happened in any other equal period in the his- 


286 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


tory of our globe. The seemingly trifling 
character of some of the incidents which are 
made the subjects of prophecy at first sur- 
prises us ; but that surprise changes into won- 
der as we perceive that they fix our attention 
upon the death of J esus Christ, as the central 
incident of this world’s strange history, the 
one around which the whole spiritual govern- 
ment of this earth revolves. By all those 
promises and prophecies, those typical persons 
and typical events and typical services, — the 
raising of the altar, the slaying of the sacri- 
fice, the institution of the priesthood, the ark, 
with its broken tables and sprinkled mercy- 
seat, the Passover, the great day of atone- 
ment, the passage of the High Priest within 
the veil ; — by the voice of God himself speak- 
ing, in the first promise, about the seed of the 
woman, and the bruising of his heel ; by the 
wonderful Psalms of David, in which the gen- 
eral description of the suffering righteous man 
passes into those minute details which were 
embodied in the Crucifixion; by those rapt 
utterances of Isaiah, some portions of which 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


287 


read now more like histories of the past than 
intimations of the future, — the eye of this 
world’s hope was turned to that event before- 
hand, as backward to it the eye of the world’s 
faith has ever since been directed. 

But, Thirdly, that we may make our way 
into the very heart of its meaning, does not 
the expression, “ It is finished,” suggest the 
idea of a prescribed, a distinct, a definite work, 
brought to a final, satisfactory, and triumph- 
ant conclusion ? Spoken in no boastful spirit, 
it is the language of one who, having had a 
great commission given him, a great task as- 
signed, announces that the commission has 
been executed, the task fulfilled. Taking it 
as the simple announcement of the fact, that 
some great transaction was brought to its con- 
summation, we ask ourselves, as we contem- 
plate the entire circle of the Redeemer’s 
services to our race, still running out their 
course, what part of these services was it of 
which it could be said that it was then finished? 
Here, in the foreground, we have to put that 
one and perfect sacrifice which he offered up 


288 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


for the sin of the world. Through the Eter- 
nal Spirit, he offered himself without spot to 
God, and by that one sacrifice for sin, once 
for all, he hath perfected for ever those that 
are sanctified ; he hath done all that was 
needed to atone for human guilt, to redeem us 
from the curse of the law, to finish transgres- 
sion, to make an end of sin, to make recon- 
ciliation for iniquity. 

But again, Christ’s death upon the cross 
brought to a close that obedience to the Di- 
vine law, that perfect fulfilment of all the 
righteousness which it required ; held out to 
us as the ground upon which we are to find 
immediate and full acceptance with our Maker. 
“As by one man’s disobedience many were 
made sinners ; so by the obedience of one 
shall many be made righteous.” “ lie made 
him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we 
might be made the righteousness of God in 
him.” “ For all have sinned, and come short 
of the glory of God : being justified freely by 
his grace, through the redemption that is in 
Christ Jesus ; whom God hath set forth to be 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


289 


a propitiation through faith in his blood, to 
declare his righteousness for the remission of 
sins that are past ; to declare, I say, at this 
time his righteousness ; that he might be just, 
and the justifier of him which believe th in 
Jesus.” 

Further still — though embraced indeed in 
the two particulars of the sufferings and ser- 
vices of the Redeemer already mentioned — - 
there was finished upon the cross the new, the 
full, the wonderful revelation of the Father, 
that unbosoming of the Eternal, the opening 
up to us of the very heart of the Godhead, 
the exhibition of the mingled love and holi- 
ness of our Father who is in heaven. There 
was completed then that glorious, that attract- 
ive, that subduing manifestation of the love 
of God for sinful men, which carried the Di- 
vine Being to the extreme length of suffering 
and of self-sacrifice, and which has ever 
formed the most powerful of all instruments 
for pacifying the conscience, melting the heart, 
moulding the character, renewing and sancti- 
fying the will. 


13 


290 


“IT IS FINISHED . 1 


Whether, then, he looked up to God, and 
thought of his having glorified his name, 
finished the work that had been given him to 
do ; or whether he looked down to man, and 
thought of the saving power which his cross 
was to exert over millions upon millions of 
the human family, it may well have been to 
Jesus Christ a moment of intensest joy, 
when — his last pang endured, his last service 
rendered, his strictly vicarious work com- 
pleted — he exclaimed, “ It is finished !” 

To Jesus Christ alone was given that joy 
in dying which springs from the knowledge 
that all the ends of living and dying had 
been perfectly answered. Looking upon the 
career he had pursued, he could see not a 
single blot nor blank space in the whole. Of 
what other man, cut off as he was in the 
midst of his years, could the same be said ? 
When good and great men die in the full flush 
of their manhood, the full vigor of their 
powers, we are apt to mourn the untimely 
stroke that has laid them low, that has cut 
short so many of the undertakings they were 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


291 


engaged in, deprived the world of so much 
service that it was in their heart to have ren- 
dered. Nor can any such look back upon the 
past without this humbling feeling in the 
retrospect, that many an offence has been 
committed, many a duty left imperfectly dis- 
charged. But for us there is no place for 
mourning, as we contemplate the death of our 
Redeemer, which came to close the one and 
only life which, stainless throughout its every 
hour, did so thoroughly and to the last degree 
of the Divine requirement accomplish all that 
had been intended. And for him it was as if 
the cup of bitterness having been drunk, the 
cry of agony as he drained the last drop of it 
having been uttered, there was given to him, 
even before he died, to taste a single drop of 
that other cup — that cup of full ecstatic bliss, 
which the contemplation of the travail of his 
soul, of the glory it rendered to the Father, 
the good it did to man, shall never cease to 
yield. 

But to what practical use are we to turn 
this declaration of our dying Saviour ? He 


292 


“IT IS FINISHED.' 


rested complacently, gratefully, exultingly in 
the thought that his work for us was finished. 
Shall we not try to enter into the full mean- 
ing of this great saying ? Shall we not try, 
in the way in which it becomes us, to enter 
with him into that same rest ? For the for- 
giveness, then, of all our sins, for our accept- 
ance with a holy and righteous God, let us 
put our sole, immediate, and entire trust upon 
this finished work of our Redeemer ; let us 
believe, that whatever obstacles our guilt 
threw in the way of our being received back 
into the Divine favor, have been removed ; 
that whatever the holiness of the lawgiver, 
and the integrity of his law, and the moral 
interests of his government required in the 
way of atonement or expiation, has been ren- 
dered. Let us look upon the way of access 
to God as lying quite open to us ; let us take 
the pardon ; let us enter into peace with 
God ; let us bring all our guilt and bury it 
in the depths of his atonement. Let us lay 
hold of the righteousness of Christ, and clothe 
ourselves with it in the Divine presence ; and 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


293 


regarding the reconciliation with God, effected 
by the death of his dear Son, as only the 
first step or stage of the Christian salvation, 
let us throw open our whole mind and heart 
to the blessed influences that Christ’s love, 
his life, his sufferings, his death, his entire 
example were intended to exert in making us 
less selfish, more loving, more dutiful, more 
thankful, more submissive, more holy. 

There still remain, for one or two brief 
remarks, these last words of our Redeemer, — 
“ Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” 
The words are borrowed from one of the 
Fsalms. Jesus dies with a passage of the 
old Hebrew Scriptures on his lips, only he 
prefaces the words by the epithet so familiar 
to his lips and heart, “ Father.” In the 
depth of his bitter anguish, under the dark- 
ness of momentary desolation, he had dropped 
this phrase. It had been then, “My God, 
my God !” But now, once more, in the light 
that shines within, around, he resumes it, and 
he says, “ Father, into thy hands I commit 
my spirit.” If the saying which went before, 


294 


“IT is finished; 


“ It is finished,” be taken, as it well may be, 
as Christ’s last word of farewell to the world 
he leaves behind, this may be taken as his 
first word of greeting to the new world that 
he is about to enter. New world, we say, for 
though, as the Eternal Son, he was but re- 
turning to the glory that he had with the 
Father before the world was, let us not forget 
that death was to the humanity of the Lord, 
— as it will be to each and all of us, — an en- 
trance upon a new and untried state. It 
seems to us as if, in these last words of our 
Elder Brother, it was that nature of ours he 
wore which breathed itself forth in our hear- 
ing ; that human nature which, when the hour 
of departure comes, looks out with trembling 
solicitude into the world of spirits, seeking 
for some one there into whose hands the de- 
parting spirit may confidingly commit itself. 
In the “ It is finished,” the voice of the great 
High Priest, the Eternal Son of the Father, 
predominates. In the “ Father, into thy 
hands I commit my spirit,” is it not the voice 
of the man Christ Jesus that mainly salutes 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


295 


our ear ? No timidity, indeed, nor fear, nor 
any such trembling awe as any of us might 
fitly feel in dying. Nothing of these ; not a 
shadow of them here ; yet certainly solemnity, 
concern, the sense as of a need of some sup- 
port, some upbearing hand. And shall we 
not thank our Saviour, that not only has he 
made the passage before us, and opened for 
us, in doing so, the gate to eternal life, but 
taught us, by his own example, not to wonder 
if our weak human nature, as it stands upon 
the brink, should look out with an eager soli- 
citude to find the hands into which, in mak- 
ing the great transition, it may throw itself? 

And where shall we find those hands ? He 
found them in the hands of that Father, who 
at all times had been so well pleased with 
him. We find them in his hands who went 
thus before us to his Father and our Father, 
to his God and our God. # PIe too found them 
there who has left us the earliest example 
how a true Christian may and ought to die. 
Considering the small number of the Lord’s 
disciples, we may believe that Stephen was 


296 


“IT IS FINISHED.” 


not only the first of the Christian martyrs, but 
actually the first after the crucifixion who fell 
asleep in Jesus. Can we doubt that in dying 
the last words of Jesus were in Stephen’s 
memory ? There had been too many points of 
resemblance between his own and his Master’s 
trial and condemnation, for Stephen not to 
have the close of the Redeemer’s life before 
his mind. His dying prayer is an echo of 
that which came from his Master’s lips ; the 
same, yet changed. It might do for the sin- 
less one to say, “ Father, into thy hands I 
commit my spirit.” It is not for the sinful to 
take up at once and appropriate such words ; 
so, turning to Jesus, the dying martyr says, 
u Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” in that sim- 
ple, fervent, confiding petition, leaving behind 
him, for all ages, the pattern of a sinner’s 
dying prayer, modelled upon the last words of 
the dying Saviour. * 


XII. 


8 ft* grttomtant ptafta.* 

In all its outward form and circumstance, 
there scarcely could have been a lowlier en- 
trance into this world of ours than that made 
by Jesus Christ. The poorest wandering 
gipsy’s child has seldom had a meaner birth. 
There was no room for Mary in the inn. She 
brought forth her first-born son amid the 
beasts of the stall, and she laid him in a 
manger. But was that birth — which, though 
it had so little about it to draw the notice of 
man, was yet the greatest that this earth has 
ever witnessed — to pass by without any token 
of its greatness given ? No ; other eyes than 
those of men were fixed on it, and other 

* Matt, xxvii. 51-54; Mark xv. 39; Luke xxiii. 47-49 ; John 
x-ix. 31-37 


298 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


tongues were loosed to celebrate it. The 
glory of the Lord shone around the shep- 
herds, and a multitude of the heavenly host, 
borrowing for a time the speech of Canaan, 
filled the midnight sky with their praises, as 
they chanted, “ Glory to God in the highest, 
and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.” 
Never was there a lowlier cradle than that in 
which the new-born Redeemer lay ; but over 
what other cradle was there ever such a birth- 
hymn sung ? 

And as with the birth, so also with the 
death of Jesus. In all its outward form and 
circumstance, a more humiliating death than 
that of being crucified as one of three con- 
victed felons, he could not have died. There 
was no darker, more degrading passage through 
which he could have been sent forth from 
among the living. But was that death of the 
Eternal Son of God to have no outward marks 
of its importance imprinted on it ? Left to 
man, there had been none ; but Heaven will 
not let it pass unsignalized. And so, at mid- 
day the darkness came and settled for three 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


299 


hours around the cross; and when at the 
ninth hour Jesus gave up the ghost, the veil 
of the Temple was torn in twain from the top 
to the bottom, and the rocks rent, and the 
graves opened. These were the external seals 
which the hand of the Omnipotent stamped 
upon the event, proclaiming its importance. 
But these seals were also symbols ; they were 
more than mere preternatural indications that 
this was no common death. Each in its way 
told something about the character and object 
of this death. The mystery of those hidden 
sufferings of the Redeemer’s spirit, — the inner 
darkening of the light of his Father’s counte- 
nance, — stood shadowed forth in the three 
hours’ darkness. The rending of the veil had 
a meaning of its own, which it scarcely needed 
an apostle to interpret. To the few eyes that 
witnessed it, it must have been a most myste- 
rious spectacle. Jesus died at the third hour 
after mid-day; the very hour when eager 
crowds of worshippers would be thronging 
into the courts of the Temple, and all would 
be preparing for the evening sacrifice. Within 


800 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


the Holy Place, kindling perhaps the many 
lights of the golden candlestick, some priests 
would he busy before the inner veil which 
hung between them and the Holy of Holies ; 
that veil no thin, old, time-worn piece of faded 
drapery, but fresh, and strong, and thickly 
woven, for they renewed it year by year ; 
that Holy of Holies — the dark, secluded 
apartment within which lay the ark of the 
covenant, with the cherubim above it shadow- 
ing the mercy-seat, which no mortal footstep 
was permitted to invade, save that of the 
High Priest once only every year. How 
strange, how awful to the ministering priests, 
standing before that veil, to feel the earth 
tremble beneath their feet, and to see the 
strong veil grasped, as if by two unseen 
hands of superhuman strength, and torn 
down in the middle from top to bottom, — the 
glaring light of day, that never, for long cen- 
turies gone by, had entered there, flung into 
that sacred tenement, and all its mysteries 
laid open to vulgar gaze. The Holy Ghost 
by all this signified that while as yet that first 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


301 


tabernacle was standing, the way into the 
holiest, the access to God, was not yet made 
manifest ; but now, Christ being come, to 
offer himself without spot to God, neither by 
the blood of goats nor calves, but by his own 
blood, to enter into the true Holy of Holies, 
* — even as he died on Calvary that veil was 
rent asunder thus within the Temple to teach 
us that a new and living way, open to all, ac- 
cessible to all, had been consecrated for us 
through the rending of the Redeemer’s flesh, 
that we might have boldness to enter into the 
holiest, and might draw near, each of us, to 
God, with a new heart and in full assurance 
of faith. Little of all this may those few 
priests have known who stood that day, gaz- 
ing with awe-struck wonder upon that work- 
ing of the Divine and unseen hand, — to them 
a sign of terror, rather than a symbol of what 
the death on Calvary had done. We read, 
however, that not long afterwards — within a 
year — many priests became obedient unto the 
faith ; and it pleases us to think that among 
those who, from the inner heart of Judaism, 


302 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


from the stronghold of its priestly caste, were 
converted unto Christ, some of them may 
have been numbered whose first movement in 
that direction was given them as they wit- 
nessed that rending of the veil, that laying 
open of the Most Holy Place. 

“ And the earth did quake : and the rocks 
rent; and the graves were opened” — the main 
office, let us believe, of that earthquake which 
accompanied or immediately followed upon the 
death of Christ, — not to strike terror into the 
hearts of men ; not to herald judgments upon 
this earth ; not to swallow up the living in its 
opening jaws ; no, but to shake the domains 
of death ; to break the stony fetters of the 
dead ; to lay open the graves, out of which 
the bodies of the saints might arise. It seems 
clear enough, from the words which Matthew 
uses — who is the only one of the Evangelists 
who alludes to the event, — that they did not 
come out of their graves till the morning of 
our Lord’s own resurrection. It is scarcely 
conceivable that they had been re-animated 
before that time, and lain awake in their graves 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


303 


till his rising called them from their tombs. 
Then they did arise, and went into the Holy 
City, and appeared unto many, — one cer- 
tainly, of the most mj^sterious incidents which 
attended the death and resurrection of the 
Saviour, suggesting many a question: Who 
were they that thus arose ? were they of the 
recently dead, recognized by loving relatives 
in the Holy City, or were they chosen from 
the buried of many bygone generations ? Hid 
they return to their sepulchres, or did the 
grave never more close over them ? Hid they 
after a brief appearance in the Holy City, 
pass into the heavenly Jerusalem ? or did 
they linger upon this earth, to be the com- 
panions of our Lord during those forty days, 
so small a portion of which is occupied by 
Christ’s appearances to his disciples, the rest 
spent where and how we know not; and did 
they, that ministry to Jesus over, go up with 
him into the heavenly places? All about 
them is hid in the deepest obscurity. Like 
shadows they come, like shadows they depart. 
This, however, their presence told, that the 


304 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


voice which from the cross cried, “It is 
finished,” went where sound of human voice 
had never gone before, and did what sound of 
human voice had never done. It was heard 
among the dead ; it stirred the heavy sleep- 
ers there, and piercing the stony sepulchre, 
went quivering into ears long sealed against 
all sound. And when the third morning 
dawned, these bodies of the saints arose, to 
complete as it were the pledge and promise of 
the general resurrection of the dead which our 
Lord’s own rising carried with it, and having 
done that office, silently and mysteriously 
withdrew. You may have sometimes seen a 
day in early spring, stolen from the coming 
summer, a day of sunshine so bright and 
warm, of air so bland, of breeze so gentle, 
that, as if fancying that her resurrection-time 
had come, dead nature woke, buds began to 
burst, flower-leaves to unfold, and birds to 
sing, — all to be shut up again in death, as the 
bleak withering winds of days that followed 
swept across the plain. Even into such a day 
did the appearance of these old tenants of the 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


305 


grave turn that of our Lord’s resurrection, 
lightening and enriching it with the promise 
of the time when all that are in their graves 
shall hear Christ’s voice, and his full and final 
victory over death and the grave shall be ac- 
complished. 

Mark the Evangelist, to whom we are in- 
debted for so many minute and graphic inci- 
dents in the gospel history, tells us that at 
the moment when Christ expired, the Roman 
officer in charge was standing over against 
him, within a few yards of the cross, gazing 
on the face of the crucified. He had halted 
there as the darkness rolled away. He heard 
that loud and piercing cry, as of one forsaken, 
come from the lips of Jesus. He saw the 
change come over the Saviour’s countenance, 
the light that spread over those pallid features, 
the joy that beamed from those uplifted eyes. 
Another and a louder cry, — not now the cry 
as of one sinking in conflict, but of one rejoi- 
cing in victory, — when suddenly Jesus bows 
his head and gives up the ghost; that mo- 
ment, too, the earthquake shook the earth, 


806 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


and the cross of Jesus trembled before the 
Roman’s eyes. The shaking earth, the trem- 
bling cross, impressed him less, as Mark lets 
us know, than the loud cry so instantly fol- 
lowed by death. He had, perhaps, been pres- 
ent at other crucifixions, and knew well how 
long the band he ruled was ordinarily required 
to watch the crucified. But he had never 
seen, he had never known, he had never heard 
of a man dying upon a cross within six hours. 
He had seen other men expire; had watched 
weak nature as it wanes away at death — the 
voice sinking into feebleness with its last ef- 
forts at articulation, — but he had never heard 
a man in dying speak in tones like these. 
And so impressed was he with what he saw 
and heard, that instantly and spontaneously 
he exclaimed, “ Truly this man was the Son 
of God !” Foreigner and Gentile as he was, 
he may have attached no higher meaning to 
the epithet than Pilate did when he said to 
Jesus, “Art thou then the Son of God?” 
This much, however, he meant to say, that 
truly and to his judgment this Jesus was more 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


307 


than human — was divine — was that very Son 
of God, whatever this might mean, which 
these Jews had- condemned him for claiming 
to be. Such was the faith so quickly kindled 
in this Gentile breast. The Cross is early 
giving tokens of its power. It lays hold of 
the dying thief, and opens to him the gates of 
Paradise. It lays hold of this Centurion, and 
works in him a faith which, let us hope, deep- 
ened into a trust in Jesus as his Saviour. 
From such unlikely quarters came the two tes- 
timonies borne to the Lord's divinity the day 
he died. 

The Centurion speaks of him as one already 
dead. The pale face and the drooping head 
tell all the lookers-on that he has breathed 
his last. The great interest of the day is 
over ; the crowd breaks up ; group after 
group returning to Jerusalem, in very differ- 
ent mood and temper from that in which they 
had come out a few hours before. It had 
been little more at first than an idle curiosity 
which had drawn many of those onlookers 
that morning from their dwellings. Cherish- 


308 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


ing, perhaps, no particular ill-will to Jesus, 
they had joined the procession on its way to 
Calvary. They gather by the way that this 
Jesus has been convicted as a pretender, who 
had impiously claimed to be their king, their 
Christ. They see how irritated the High 
Priests and their followers are at him. It is 
an unusual thing for these magnates of the 
people to come out, as they now are doing, 
to attend a public execution. There must 
surely be something peculiarly criminal in this 
Jesus, against whom their enmity is so bit- 
ter. Soon these new comers catch the spirit 
that their rulers have breathed into the crowd, 
and for the first three hours they heartily 
chime in with the others, and keep up their 
mockery of the crucified. But from the mo- 
ment that the darkness falls upon them, what 
a change ! There they stand, silently peering 
through the gloom ; no jest nor laughter now, 
nor strife of mocking tongues. Upon that 
cross, but dimly seen, their eyes are fixed. 
The wonder grows as to how all this shall end. 
It ends with those prodigies that accompany 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


309 


the death. Appalled by these, they smite 
upon their breasts — as Easterns do in pres- 
ence of all superhuman power — and make 
their way back to their homes ; no noisy, 
shouting rabble, but each man silent, and full 
of thought and awe. Who or what, then, 
could that Jesus be whom they had seen die 
such a death, — at whose death the whole 
frame of nature seemed to quiver ? What- 
ever he was, he was not what their rulers had 
told them. No false, deceitful man, no im- 
pious pretender. Was he then indeed their 
Christ, their king ? They got the answer to 
those questions a few weeks later, when Peter 
preached to that great company on the day 
of Pentecost ; and may we not believe that 
among those who listened to the great Apos- 
tle on that occasion, and to whom he spake 
as to the very men who, with wicked hands, 
had slain the Lord of glory, there were not a 
few of those who now returned to Jerusalem 
from Calvary, impressed and half-convinced, 
waiting but the work of the Spirit to turn 


310 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


them into true and faithful followers of the 
Crucified ? 

Such was the impression made upon the 
Roman officer, and on a section of the by- 
standers. But the High Priests and their 
minions, the true crucifiers of the Lord, — 
what impression has all which has happened 
thus at Calvar}? - made on them ? Has it stir- 
red any doubt, has it awakened any compunc- 
tion, has it allayed their fears or quenched 
their hate ? No ; they witness all these won- 
ders, and remain hard and unrelenting as at 
the first. Speaking of that obduracy, which 
stood out against all the demonstrations of 
the Lord’s Divinity, St. Gregory exclaims, 
“ The heavens knew him, and forthwith sent 
out a star and a company of angels to sing 
his birth. The sea knew him, and made itself 
a way to be trodden by his feet ; the earth 
knew him, and trembled at his dying ; the 
sun knew him, and hid the rays of its light ; 
the rocks knew him, for they were rent in 
twain ; Hades knew him, and gave up the 
dead it had received. But though the sense- 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


311 


less elements perceived him to he their Lord, 
the hearts of the unbelieving Jews knew him 
not as God, and, harder than the very rocks, 
were not rent by repentance.” 

The only effect upon the rulers of the 
Jewish people of the sudden and unexpected 
death of Jesus was to set them thinking how 
the crosses and bodies which hung upon them 
might most speedily be removed. Their own 
Jewish code forbade that the body of one 
hung upon a tree should remain suspended 
over a single night : “ His body shall not re- 
main all night upon the tree, but thou shalt 
in any wise bury him that day, that thy land 
be not defiled.”* As crucifixion was a mode 
of punishment originally unknown among the 
Jews, this command refers to the case of those 
who, after death by stoning or strangulation, 
were hung upon a gibbet. The Homan law 
and practice were different. Crucifixion was 
the mode of death to which slaves and the 
greater criminals were doomed. In ordinary 
circumstances, the bodies of the crucified 


* See Dent. xxi. 


312 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


were suffered to hang upon the cross till the 
action of the elements, at times otherwise 
aided and accelerated, wasted them away. 
Even when sepulture was allowed, it was 
thought profitable for the ends of justice that 
for some days the frightful spectacle should 
be exposed to the public eye. In no case 
under the Roman rule did burial take place 
on the very day of the execution. If that 
rule were in this instance to be broken, it 
must be under the special leave and direction 
of Pilate. Besides, however, the natural de- 
sire that their own rather than the Roman 
method of dealing with the crucified should 
be followed, there was another and more 
special reason why the Jews desired that the 
bodies should as quickly as possible be re- 
moved. Next day was the Sabbath ; no com- 
mon Sabbath either — the Sabbath of the great 
Paschal festival. It began at sunset. Only 
an hour or two remained. It would be offen- 
sive, ill-ominous, if on a day so sacred three 
bodies hanging upon crosses should be ex- 
hibited so near the Holy City. It would dis- 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


313 


turb, defile the services of th& holy day. 
Besides, who could tell what effect upon the 
changeful, excitable multitude this spectacle 
of Jesus might have, if kept so long before 
their eyes ? A deputation is despatched, 
therefore, to Pilate, to entreat him to give 
orders that means may be taken to expedite 
the death by crucifixion, and have the bodies 
removed. Pilate accedes to the request; the 
necessary order is forwarded to Calvary, and 
the soldiers proceed in the ordinary way to 
execute it. They break the legs of both the 
others ; they pass Jesus by. There is every 
sign, indeed, that he is already dead, but why 
not make his death thus doubly sure ? Perhaps, 
even over the spirits of those rough and hard- 
ened men, the Saviour’s looks and words, the 
manner of his death, the darkness and the 
earthquake, which they connected in some 
way with him, may have caused a feeling 
of awe to creep, restraining them from sub- 
jecting him to that rough handling which they 
were ready enough to give to the others. 

However this may have been, the shield of 
14 


314 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


that prophecy, — “ A hone of him shall not he 
broken/’ guarded his limbs from their rude 
and crushing strokes. 

One, indeed, of the soldiers is not to he re- 
strained, and to make sure that this seeming 
death is real, he lifts his spear as he passes 
by, and thrusts it into the Redeemer’s side ; 
a strong, rude thrust, sufficient of itself to 
have caused death, inflicting a wide, deep 
wound, that left behind such a scar, that Jesus 
could say to Thomas afterwards, “ Reach hither 
thy hand, and thrust it into my side.” From 
that wound there flowed out blood and water, 
in such quantity, that the outflow attracted 
the special notice of John, who was standing 
at some distance from the cross ; the blood and 
the water so distinct and distinguishable from 
one another, that this observer could not be 
deceived, and thought it right to leave behind 
him this peculiarly emphatic testimony : “ He 
that saw it bare record, and his record is 
true ; and he knoweth that he saith true, that 
ye might believe.” It has been thought that 
John was led to put such stress upon this in- 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


315 


cident of the crucifixion, and to press into 
such prominence his own testimony as an eye- 
witness to its reality, on account of the con- 
vincing refutation thus afforded of two strange 
heresies that sprung up early in the Church : 
the first, that Jesus had never really died 
upon the cross, but only passed into a swoon, 
from which he afterwards revived ; and the 
second, that it was not a real human body of 
flesh and blood, but only the appearance of 
one that was suspended on the cross. It may 
have been that the Evangelist had these beliefs 
in view. But whatever was his immediate 
object in testifying so particularly and so earn- 
estly to the fact, it only puts that fact so 
much the more clearly now before our eyes, 
authorizing us to assume it as placed beyond 
all doubt, that within an hour or so after 
Christ’s death — for it could not have been 
much longer, when a deep incision was made 
in the side of the Redeemer, there visibly 
flowed forth a copious stream of blood and 
water. Is that fact of any moment, does it 
give any clue to, or throw any light upon the 


316 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


proximate or physical cause of the death of 
Christ ? The answer to these questions we 
reserve for our next Lecture. 

Meanwhile, let us give a moment or two 
more to reflection upon that strange variety of 
impression and effect which the crucifixion of 
our Lord had upon the original spectators. 
There were those whom that spectacle plunged 
into a despondency bordering on despair. 
Mary, the mother of our Lord, was not able 
to bear that sight, and the love of her Divine 
Son went forth, and withdrew her early from 
the trial of seeing him expire. His other ac- 
quaintance, and the women that followed him 
from Galilee, stood afar off, beholding ; half 
ashamed and half afraid ; with something of 
hope, with more of fear ; lost in wonder that 
he, about whom they had been cherishing 
such grand, yet false and earthly expecta- 
tions, should suffer himself, or should be suf- 
fered by that Father — of whom he had so 
often spoken as hearing him always, who had 
himself declared that he was at all times well 
pleased with him — to die such a death as this. 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


317 


As the darkness fell, perhaps a new hope 
sprung up within some of their breasts. Was 
Jesus about to use that darkness as a veil be- 
hind which he would withdraw himself, as he 
had withdrawn himself from those who were 
about to cast him from the rocky height at 
Nazareth ? Had he gone up to that cross to 
work there the greatest of his miracles? and 
was he in very deed about to meet the taunt 
of his enemies, and come down from the cross 
that they might believe in him ? Alas ! if 
any such hope arose, the ninth hour quenched 
it ; and when they saw him draw his latest 
breath, this band of friends and followers of 
Jesus turned their backs on Calvary, with 
slow, sad footsteps, to return, dispirited and 
disconsolate, to their homes. Mainly this was 
owing to the strength of that prejudice which 
had so early taken such strong possession of 
their minds, that the kingdom which their 
new Master was to set up was a temporal one. 
To that prejudice so sudden and so overwhelm- 
ing a shock was given by the crucifixion, that, 
stunned and stupefied by it, these simple- 


318 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


minded followers of Jesus were for a time 
unable to recall, and unprepared to believe, 
his own predictions as to his death. Upon 
the Scribes and Pharisees, the Chief Priests 
and rulers of the people, the six hours of the 
crucifixion had, as we have seen, none other 
than a hardening effect. The gentleness, the 
patience, the forgiving spirit, the thoughtful- 
ness for others, the sore trouble of his own 
spirit, the supernatural darkness, the return- 
ing light, the sudden and sublime decease, the 
reeling earth, the opening graves ; — all these, 
which might have moved them, had they not 
been possessed by the one great passion of 
quenching for ever the hated pretensions of 
this Nazarene — have no other influence upon 
their spirits than quickening their ingenuity 
to contrive how best, most quickly, and most 
securely, they can accomplish their design. 
And these are they of all that motley crowd, 
who knew the most, and made the greatest 
profession of religion ! These are the men 
who would not that morning cross the thresh- 
old of Pilate’s dwelling, lest they might unfit 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


319 


themselves for the morrow’s duties within the 
Temple ! These are the men who cannot bear 
the thought that the services of their great 
Paschal Sabbath should be polluted by the 
proximity of the three crosses of Golgotha ! 
They can spill, without compunction, the 
blood of the innocent. They can take that 
blood upon themselves and upon their chil- 
dren, but they cannot suffer the sight of it to 
offend their eye as they go up to worship upon 
Mount Zion. These are the men who, in 
their deep self-ignorance, in their proud and 
boastful spirit, were wont to say, “ If we had 
been in the days of our fathers, we would not 
have been partakers with them in the blood 
of the prophets.” These are the men whose 
whole character and conduct are suggestive of 
the likenesses to themselves that have arisen 
in every age of the church, one of whose noted 
peculiarities is ever this, that to wound their 
pride, or expose in any way their hollow 
pretensions, is sure to draw down on all who 
attempt the dangerous office the very same 


320 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


malignity of dislike and persecution that 
nailed our Saviour to his cross. 

Upon many of the crowd which stood for 
those six hours around the cross, the events 
that transpired there appear to have produced 
that surprise, solemnity, alarm, and subdued 
state of feeling, they were so fitted to pro- 
duce on the hulk of mankind. We have 
already ventured to express the hope that, 
with not a few of them, what they saw and 
heard prepared their minds and opened their 
hearts to receive the good seed which, scat- 
tered on the day of Pentecost by apostolic 
hands, was so watered with the influences of 
the Holy Spirit. 

But are we wrong in imagining, of another 
and perhaps still larger proportion of those 
who returned, beating their breasts, to Jeru- 
salem, that a few days, or a few weeks, 
brought them down to their ordinary and 
natural condition of indifference and uncon- 
cern ? Yes, they would say, that was a won- 
derful forenoon ; there was a strange concur- 
rence of striking things about the close of 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


321 


that strange man’s life ; but as to any further 
inquiry after him — the lending their ears to 
that gospel which set him forth as crucified to 
redeem their souls from death, and cover, by 
his mediation, the multitude of their sins — 
they became too callous, the world got too 
strong a hold of them, to admit of their giv- 
ing any further or more earnest heed. Have 
not these, too, their likenesses among us ? 
men capable of strong but temporary impres- 
sions. Bring them to Golgotha, set up the 
cross before them, let them see the Saviour 
die, and their breasts may own a sentiment 
akin to that which affected so many originally 
at Calvary : but they are morning clouds 
those feelings, it is an early dew this soften- 
ing of their hearts ; let the bright sun rise, 
the fresh breeze blow ; let the day, with so 
many calls to business and pleasure come, 
and those clouds vanish, — this dew disap- 
pears. And yet the cross was not to be lifted 
up in vain. It hardened the Pharisees, it 
dispirited the disciples, it awed the multitude ; 

but it saved the penitent thief, and it con- 
14 * 


322 


THE ATTENDANT MIRACLES. 


vinced the unprejudiced Centurion. “ I,” said 
the Lord himself, contemplating beforehand 
the triumph of his cross, — “ I, if I be lifted 
up, will draw all men unto me.” And when 
he was lifted up, even before he died, and in 
the very act of dying, he drew to him that 
Gentile and that Jew, each one the leader of 
a multitude that no man may number, upon 
whom the power of that attraction has since 
acted. God grant that upon all our spirits 
this power may come, drawing us to Jesus 
now, and lifting us at last to heaven. 


XIII. 

%\u ppial (&wu tlte §mtb of (S>M$t * 

Had no one interfered, the body of onr 
Lord had been taken down by the soldiers 
from the cross, by their cold and careless 
hands to be conveyed away to one of those 
separate burying-places reserved for those 
who had suffered the extreme penalty of the 
law. Not unfrequently, in such cases, friends 
or relatives came forward to crave the body 
at the hands of the authorities, that they 
might give it a more becoming burial. There 
was but one exception, the case of those 
whose crime was treason against the State, — 
the very crime for which Christ had, nomin- 
ally at least, been condemned. In that in- 
stance the mode of disposal of the body pre- 

* John xix. 33-35; Mark xv. 42-45. 


324 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


scribed by law was rarely if ever departed 
from. But where are there any friends or 
relatives of Jesus in condition hopefully to in- 
terfere ? That small band of his acquaint- 
ance, which has stood throughout the cruci- 
fixion beholding it afar off, is composed 
principally of women. John, indeed, is there, 
a witness of the closing scene, and of the pre- 
paration made for the removal of the bodies. 
But was Pilate, to whom application must of 
course be made, likely to listen to any peti- 
tion that he might present ? John knew 
something of the High Priest, but nothing 
of the Boman Governor. There was every 
thing in fact to discourage him from making 
any application in that quarter, even if the 
idea of doing so had occurred to him. But it 
is most unlikely that it had. For what could 
John, or the disciples generally, have done 
with the body of their Master though they 
had got it into their hands ? It must be 
buried quickly, — within an hour or so. And 
where could these Galilean strangers find a 
grave at Jerusalem to lay it in, where but in 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


325 


some Exposed and public place of sepulture, 
unsuitable for the destiny in store for it ? 

At the fitting time, the fit instrument ap- 
pears. Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man, an 
honorable councillor, a member of the Sanhe- 
drim well known as such to Pilate, has either 
himself been present at the crucifixion, or 
hears how matters stand. Shall the body of 
Jesus pass into the rough hands of these 
Roman soldiers, and be dragged by them to a 
dishonored burial ? Not if he can hinder it. 
He has a new sepulchre of his own, close by 
the very place where Christ has died, whose 
very nearness to the spot suggests to him how 
suitable a place it would be for so sacred a 
deposit. Joseph goes instantly to Pilate, and 
boldly asks that the body may be giyen to 
him. Pilate makes no difficulty regarding the 
alleged crime of Jesus. He never had be- 
lieved that Christ was guilty of treason 
against Caesar’s government; does not now 
act on any such assumption. But Joseph has 
told him something about the time and man- 
ner of the Saviours death which he had not 


326 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


heard before, which greatly amazes and in- 
duces him to hesitate. Those Jews who had 
come to him a short time before, with the re- 
quest that he would issue an order that the 
bones of the three might be broken and their 
bodies removed, must have come to him after 
the three hours’ darkness, after the death of 
Christ. But they had told him nothing about 
that death. They had spoken as if the same 
means for expediting their decease had to be 
taken with all the three. Now, for the first 
time, he hears that Jesus had, even then, 
breathed his last ; had died just as that mys- 
terious darkness, which had troubled Pilate as 
it had troubled the crowd at Golgotha, had 
rolled away ; as that earthquake, which had 
shaken every dwelling in Jerusalem, had been 
felt within his residence. Pilate will not be- 
lieve it, — can scarcely credit Joseph’s story, — 
must have a thing so strange attested upon 
better testimony. Waiving, in the meantime, 
all answer to Joseph’s request, he sends for 
the Centurion, who, doubtless, told him all 
that he had witnessed; told him about the 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


327 


loud voice, and the immediately succeeding 
death ; told him what raised in the eyes of 
these two Romans, even to the height of a 
miracle, a death like this. 

We should understand their feelings better 
were we as familiar as they were with the 
common course of things at a crucifixion. It 
is now fifteen hundred years since this mode 
of punishment ceased to he practised in 
Christendom ; it was discontinued because of 
the sacredness, the spiritual glory which 
Christ’s crucifixion had thrown around it. 
With eyes unfamiliar with its details, yet 
with imaginations that delighted to picture its 
cruelties and horrors, the priesthood of the 
middle ages put these materials into the hands 
of poets and painters, out of wdiich the popu- 
lar conceptions of the erection of the cross, 
and the sufferings on the cross, and the taking 
down from the cross, have for so long a time 
been drawn. There is much in these concep- 
tions, that by using the means of information 
which we now possess, we can assure our- 
selves is incorrect. The cross was no such 


328 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


elevated structure as we see it sometimes 
represented, needing ladders to be applied to 
get at the suspended body. It was seldom 
more than a foot or two higher than the man it 
bore ; neither was the whole weight of his body 
borne upon the nails which pierced the hands. 
Such a position of painful suspension, causing 
such a strain upon all the muscles of the up- 
per extremities, would have added greatly to 
the sufferings of the victim, and brought them 
to a much speedier close. The cross, in every 
instance, was furnished with a small piece of 
wood projecting from the upright post or beam, 
astride which the crucified sat, and which bore 
the chief weight of his body. The conse- 
quence of this arrangement was, that crucifix- 
ion was a much more lingering kind of death, 
and, in its earlier stages, a much less excru- 
ciating one than we are apt to imagine, or than 
otherwise it would have been. As there was 
but little loss of blood, — the nails that pierced 
the extremities touching no large bloodvessel, 
and closing the wounds they made, — the death 
which followed resulted from the processes of 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


329 


bodily exhaustion and irritation; and these 
were so slow, that in no case, where the per- 
son crucified was in ordinary health and vigor, 
did they terminate within twelve hours. Al- 
most invariably he survived the first twenty- 
four hours, lived generally over the second, 
occasionally even into the fifth or sixth day. 
The ancient testimonies to this fact are quite 
explicit, nor are modern ones wanting, al- 
though there are but few parts of the world 
now where crucifixion is practised. “ I was 
told,” says Captain Clapperton, speaking of 
the capital punishments inflicted in Soudan, a 
district of Africa, “ that wretches on the cross 
generally linger three days before death puts 
an end to their sufferings.” 

So well was it understood by the early 
Fathers of the Church, by those who lived in 
or near the times when this mode of capital 
punishment was still in use, that life never 
was terminated by it alone within six hours, 
as was the case with Christ, that they all 
agree in attributing his death to a supernatu- 
ral agency. Most of them, as well as many 


330 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSES OF 


of the most distinguished of our modern 
commentators, assign it to the exercise by 
Christ of the power over his own life which 
he possessed ; in accordance, it was thought, 
with his own declaration : “ No man taketh 
my life from me, but I lay it down of my- 
self. I have power to lay it down, and I 
have power to take it again. This command- 
ment have I received of my Father.” That 
Christ’s death was entirely voluntary, sub- 
mitted to of his own free will, and not under 
any outward pressure or constraint, is univer- 
sally conceded. This entire voluntariness, 
however, it will at once appear to you, is suf- 
ficiently covered and vindicated when we be- 
lieve that whatever the physical agencies 
were which combined to effect the death, it 
was an act of pure free will in him to submit 
to their operation. That without or indepen- 
dent of any such agency, Christ chose to accel- 
erate his decease upon the cross by a simple 
fiat of his own will, — breaking the tie which 
bound tody and soul together, was the solu- 
tion of the difficulty very naturally resorted 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


331 


to by those who had the clearest possible per- 
ception of the extraordinary character of this 
incident^ and who knew of no other adequate 
cause to which it could be attributed. 

Another solution, indeed, has been pro- 
posed, reserved for modern times, but not 
coming from our highest authorities, which 
would explain the speedy death of Jesus on 
the cross, by ascribing it to an extreme de- 
gree of bodily debility induced by the sleep- 
less night, the agony in the Garden, the 
scourging in Pilate’s Hall, and the mental con- 
flict at Calvary. Ail these must undoubtedly 
have told upon the frame of the suffering Re- 
deemer, and have impaired its powers of en- 
durance. But we must remember that they 
found that frame in the very flower and ful- 
ness of its strength, free, we may believe, of 
all constitutional or induced defects. Nor 
should we, in order to make out this solution 
to be sufficient, exaggerate their actual effects. 
However acute the bodily endurance of Geth- 
semane may have been, we know that Jesus 
w r as supernaturally assisted to sustain them ; 


332 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


they passed wholly away when the mental 
agony which produced them ended. You see 
no trace of them in our Lord’s presentation of 
himself to the hand which arrested him, or in 
his appearances before Caiaphas and Pilate. 
The scourging was a not uncommon precursor 
of crucifixion, and could not have enfeebled 
Christ more than it did others. He bent so 
much beneath the weight of the cross that a 
temporary relief from the burden was given ; 
but that he had not sunk in utter exhaustion 
was apparent enough, from the very manner 
in which he turned immediately thereafter to 
the daughters of Jerusalem, and from the way 
in which he spoke to them. Further evi- 
dence that Jesus did not sink prematurely 
under physical debility is afforded us by the 
fact, witnessed to particularly by many of the 
Evangelists, and which, as we saw in our last 
Lecture, made a strong impression upon the 
mind of the Centurion. The fact alluded to 
is this, that it was with a loud voice, indicat- 
ing a great amount of existing vigor, that 
Jesus uttered his last fervent exclamation on 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


333 


the cross. He did not die of sheer exhaus- 
tion, fainting away in feebleness, as one 
drained wholly of his strength. 

Are we, then, to leave the mystery of our 
Lord’s dying thus, at the ninth hour, in the 
obscurity which covers it; or is there any 
other probable explanation of the circum- 
stance ? It is now some years since a devout 
and scholarly physician,* as the result, he 
tells us, of a quarter of a century’s reading 
and reflection, ventured to suggest — dealing 
with this subject with all that reverence and 
delicacy with which it so especially requires 
to be handled — that the immediate physical 
cause of the death of Christ was the rupture 
of his heart, induced by the inner agony of 
his spirit. That strong emotion may of itself 
prostrate the body in death, is a familiar fact 
in the history of the passions.*}* Joy, or grief, 

* Dr. Stroud, in a treatise On the Physical Cause of the Death of 
Christ , published in 1841. 

•j- Ancient story tells us of one the greatest of Greek tragedians 
(Sophocles) expiring on its being announced to him that the palm 
of victory had been awarded, in a public literary contest in which 
he was engaged ; of a father dying on its being told him that, 
on the same day, three of his sons had been crowned as victors in 
the Olympian games. — See Dr. Stroud’s Treatise. 


334 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


or anger, suddenly or intensely excited, have 
been often known to produce this effect. It 
has been only, however, in later times that the 
discovery has been made, by post mortem ex- 
aminations, that in such instances, the death 
resulted from actual rupture of the heart. 
That organ, which the universal language of 
mankind has spoken of as being peculiarly 
affected by the play of the passions, has been 
found in such cases to have been rent or torn 
by the violence of its own action. The blood 
issuing from the fissure thus created has filled 
the pericardium,* and, by its pressure, stopped 
the action of the heart. In speaking of those 
who have died of a broken heart, we have 
been using words that were often exactly and 
literally true. 

If this, then, be sometimes one of the 
proved results of extreme, intense emotion, 
why may it not have been realized in the case 
of the Redeemer? If common earthly sor- 
row has broken other human hearts, why may 

* The shut sac or bag by which the heart is surrounded and en 

dosed. 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


335 


not that sorrow, deep beyond all other sor- 
row, have broken his? We know that of 
itself, apart from all external appliances, the 
agony of his spirit in Gethsemane so affected 
his body that a bloody sweat suffused it, — a 
result identical with what has been sometimes 
noticed of extreme surprise or terror having 
bathed the human body in the same kind of 
bloody dew. Why, then, should not the 
agony of the Saviour’s spirit on the cross — • 
which we have every reason to regard as a 
renewal of that in the Garden — have told 
upon his physical frame in a way equally 
analogous to other results verified by experi- 
ence? Still, however, had we nothing more 
positive to go upon, it could only be regarded 
as a conjecture, a thing conceivable and quite 
possible, that Jesus had literally died of a 
broken heart. But that striking incident, 
upon the nature of which, and the singular 
testimony regarding it, we remarked in the 
close of our last Lecture, puts positive evi- 
dence into our hands ; and the precise weight 
of this evidence every recent inquiry into the 


336 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


condition of the blood within the human body 
after death has been helping us more accu- 
rately and fully to appreciate. Let me re- 
mind you, then, that within an hour or two 
after our Saviour’s death (it could not have 
been more),- what the skilful knife of the 
anatomist does upon the subject on which it 
operates, the Roman soldier’s spear did upon 
the dead body of our Lord, — it broadly and 
deeply pierced the side, and from the wound 
inflicted thus there flowed out blood and 
water ; so much of both, and the water so 
distinguishable from the blood, as to attract 
the particular observation of John, who was 
standing a little way off. We cannot be 
wrong in fixing our attention upon a fact to 
which the beloved Apostle so especially sum- 
mons it in his Gospel. 

First, then, we have it now authenticated 
beyond reasonable doubt, that what John 
noticed, the copious outflow of blood and wa- 
ter, is precisely what would have happened 
on the supposition that the heart of our Re- 
deemer had been ruptured under the pressure 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


337 


of inward grief, — is precisely what has been 
noticed in other instances of this form of 
death. When it escapes from the blood-vessels, 
whether that escape takes place within the 
body or without, human blood within a short 
time coagulates, its watery part separating 
slowly from its thicker substance. When 
rupture of the heart takes place, and the blood 
which that organ contains passes into the peri- 
cardium, it ere long undergoes this change ; 
and, as the capsule into which it flows is large 
enough to contain many ounces’ weight of 
liquid, if, when it is full, the heart be pierced, 
the contents escaping exhibit such a stream 
of mingled blood and water as the eye of John 
noticed as he gazed upon the cross. This is 
what the anatomist has actually witnessed; 
numerous instances existing in which the 
quantity and quality of the blood escaping 
from a ruptured heart have been carefully 
noted and recorded. Having satisfied our- 
selves as to these facts, from regarding it at 
first as but an ingenious supposition, we feel 
constrained to regard it as in the highest 


338 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


degree probable that Christ our Saviour died 
this very kind of death. But what shuts us 
up to this conclusion is, that no other satisfac- 
tory explanation can be given of the outflow 
of blood and water from the Saviour’s side. 
When not extravasated — that is, when allowed 
at death to remain in the vascular system, — - 
the blood of the human body rarely coagu- 
lates, and when it does, the coagulation, or 
separation into blood and water, does not take 
place till many hours after death. In rare 
instances — of persons dying from long con- 
tinued or extreme debility — the entire blood 
of the body has been found in a half watery 
condition; but our Saviour’s death was not an 
instance of this kind, and even though it 
should be imagined that what long-continued 
illness did with others, agony of spirit did 
with him, inducing the same degree of debil- 
ity, attended with all its ordinary physical 
results ; this, which is the only other suppo- 
sition that can be held as accounting to us for 
what John witnessed, fails in this respect, 
that, pierce when or how it might, it could 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


339 


only have been a few trickling drops of watery 
blood that the spear of the soldier could have 
extracted from the Redeemer’s side. Inas- 
much, then, as all other attempted explana- 
tions of the recorded incidents of our Re- 
deemer’s death are found to be at fault, and 
inasmuch as it corresponds with and explains 
them all, we rest in the belief that such was 
the bitter agony of the Redeemer’s soul as he 
hung upon the cross, that — unstrengthened 
now by any angel from heaven, as in the Gar- 
den, when but for that strengthening the same 
issue might have been realized — the heart of 
our Redeemer was broken, and in this way 
the tie that bound body and spirit together 
was dissolved.* 

But of what use is it to institute any such 
inquiry as that in which we have been en- 
gaged ? or what gain would there be in win- 
ning for the conclusion arrived at a general 
assent ? It might be enough to say here that, 
if reverently treated, there is no single inci- 
dent connected with the life or death of our 


* See Appendix. 


340 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


Divine Redeemer, upon which it is possible 
that any light may he thrown, which does not 
solicit at our hands the utmost effort we can 
make fully and minutely to understand it. 
Even, then, though it should appear that no 
direct or practical benefit would attend the 
discovery and establishment of the true and 
proximate physical cause of the death of 
Christ, still we should regard the inquiry as 
one in itself too full of interest to refrain from 
prosecuting it. But would it not he wonder- 
ful, would it not correspond with other evi- 
dences of the truth of the Gospel narrative 
which the progress of our knowledge has 
eliminated, should' it turn out to he true, as we 
believe it has done, that the accounts of the 
sufferings and death of Jesus, drawn up by 
four independent witnesses — all of them un- 
informed as to the true state of the case, and 
signally ignorant how that which they re- 
corded might serve to reveal it — did, never- 
theless, when brought together and minutely 
scrutinized, contain within them those distinct 
and decisive tokens which the advanced 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


341 


science of this age recognizes as indicative of 
a mode of death, so singular in its character, 
so rare in its occurrence, so peculiar in its 
physical effects ? 

Would it not also give a new meaning to 
some of the expressions which in Psalms lxix. 
and xxii. — the two Psalms specially pre- 
dictive of his sufferings and death — our Sav- 
iour is himself represented as employing? 
Read together the 20th and 21st verses of 
Psalm lxix. : “ Reproach hath broken my 
heart ; and I am full of heaviness : and I 
looked for some to take pity, but there was 
none; and for comforters, but I found none. 
They gave me also gall for my meat ; and in 
my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” If 
the very kind of drink they were to offer him 
was not deemed unworthy of being specified 
in that ancient prophecy — the very smallness, 
in fact, of the incident making it serve all the 
better the purposes of the prophecy, — need 
we wonder if it were only the literal truth 
which the speaker uttered when he said, 
“ Reproach hath broken my heart”? When so 


342 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


much has turned out to he literally true, it is 
but ranking that expression with the others, 
when it also has that character assigned to it. 
Or take the 14th verse of Psalm xxii. : “ I am 
poured out like water, and all my bones are 
out of joint : my heart is like wax ; it is 
melted in the midst of my bowels.” Here, 
again, we feel that, if in other parts of that 
Psalm— if in speaking of the shooting out of 
the lips, the shaking of the head, the words 
that w T ere spoken, the parting of his garments, 
the casting of lots for his vesture — the great 
Sufferer is recognized as describing that which 
did afterwards actually occur, it is not sur- 
prising if, in describing his own bodily condi- 
tion, in speaking, as he does, especially of the 
state of his heart, he should be speaking of 
that which also was actually realized. 

But there are positive benefits attendant 
on the reception of that view of the Saviour’s 
death which I have now unfolded to you. It 
serves, I think, to spiritualize and elevate our 
conception of the sufferings of Calvary; it 
carries our thoughts away from the mere 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


343 


bodily endurances of the crucifixion ; it con- 
centrates them on that mysterious woe which 
agitated his spirit, till the very heart that 
beat within the body of the agonized Re- 
deemer, under the powerful impulse of those 
emotions which shook and wrung his soul, 
did burst and break. If the bloody sweat of 
the Garden, and the broken heart of the 
Cross, were naturally, directly, exclusively 
the results of those inward sorrows to which 
it pleased the Saviour to open his soul, that 
in the enduring of them he might bear our 
sins, then how little had man to do physically 
with the infliction of that agony wherein the 
great atonement lay ! If we have read and 
interpreted aright the details of our Lord’s 
sufferings in the Garden and on the Cross, 
these very details do of themselves throw 
into the background the corporeal part of the 
endurances, representing it in fact only as the 
appropriate physical appendix to that over- 
whelming sorrow, by which the spirit of the 
Redeemer was bowed down under the load 
of human guilt. This spiritual sorrow formed 


344 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


the body of that agony of which the corpo- 
real was but the shadow and the sign. 

From the very heart of the simple but most 
affecting records of Gethsemane and the 
Cross, there issues the voice of a double 
warning — a warning against any such esti- 
mate of the sufferings of the man Christ 
Jesus as would assimilate them to the com- 
mon sorrows of suffering humanity. As a 
man there was nothing in all that he had to 
endure from man, which can in any way ac- 
count for his sweat being as great drops of 
blood in the Garden. In the rending of his 
heart upon the cross, his sufferings remain, 
even in their outward manifestations and re- 
sults, inexplicable on any other supposition 
than that which attributes to them a vicarious 
character, representing them as borne by the 
incarnate Son of God, as the Head and Rep- 
resentative of his people. But whilst the 
very outward history of Gethsemane and the 
Cross pleads thus strongly against any lower- 
ing of our estimate of the true character and 
design of Christ’s sufferings, does it not as 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


345 


strongly and persuasively lift up its protest 
against those pictorial and sentimental repre- 
sentations of the Saviour in his agony and in 
his death, which make their appeal to a mere 
human sympathy, by dwelling upon and ex- 
aggerating the bodily endurances which were 
undergone ? We approach these closing scenes 
of our Redeemer's life, we plant our footsteps 
in the neighborhood of the Garden and the 
Cross ; as soon as we do so, we begin to feel 
that is very sacred ground we tread. We 
try to get nearer and nearer to the Great Suf- 
ferer, to look a little farther into the bosom 
of that exceeding sorrow of his troubled, 
oppressed, bewildered spirit. It is not long 
ere we become convinced, that in that sorrow 
there are elements we are altogether unable 
to compute and appreciate, and that our most 
becoming attitude, in presence of such a Suf- 
ferer as this — the One through whose suffer- 
ings for us we look for our forgiveness and 
acceptance with God — is one of childlike trust, 
devout adoring gratitude and love. It is too 
remote, too hidden a region this for us rashly 


346 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


to invade, in the hope, that with those dim 
lights which alone are in our hands, we shall 
he able to explore it. It is too sacred a re- 
gion for the vulgar tread of a mere human 
curiosity, or the busy play of a mere human 
sympathy. 

But what chiefly commends to us the view 
now given of the Redeemer’s death, is its cor- 
respondence with all that the Scriptures teach 
as to the sacrificial character of that death, — 
all that they tell us of the virtue of Christ’s 
most precious blood. More clearly and imme- 
diately than any other does this view repre- 
sent Christ’s death as the proximate and 
natural result of the offering up of himself to 
God, the pouring out of his soul in the great 
sacrifice for sin. From the lips of the broken- 
hearted, these words seem fraught to us with 
a new significance, “ No man taketh my life 
from me ; I lay it down of myself,” — all, 
even to the very death of the body, being em- 
braced in his entire willingness that there 
should be laid upon him the transgressions of 
us all. It was his soul, his life, that Jesus 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


347 


gave a ransom for many. The life was re- 
garded as lying in the blood, and so it was 
the blood of the sacrificed animal that was 
sprinkled of old upon the door-posts, upon 
the altar, upon the mercy-seat, — the atoning 
virtue regarded as accompanying the applica- 
tion of the blood ; and so, lifting this idea up 
from the level of mere ceremonialism, we are 
taught that “without shedding of blood,” 
without life given for life, “ there is no remis- 
sion ;” and so, still further pointing us to the 
one true sacrifice, we are told that not by the 
blood of bulls and goats, but by his own blood 
Christ has entered into the Holy Place, hav- 
ing obtained eternal redemption for us. It is 
the blood of Christ “ which cleanseth from all 
sin.” It is the blood of Christ “ which purges 
the conscience from dead works, to serve the 
living God.” It is the blood of the covenant 
by which we are sanctified. We know, and 
desire ever to remember, that this is but a 
figurative expression ; that the blood of Christ 
stands only as the type or emblem of the life 
that was given up to God for us. But the 


348 


THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF 


blood merely of a crucifixion does not fill up 
the type, does not put its full meaning into 
the figure. Crucifixion was not a bloody 
death, it was only a few trickling drops that 
flowed from the pierced hands and feet. But 
if, indeed, it was his very heart’s blood which 
Jesus poured out in the act of giving up his 
life for us on Calvary, with what fuller and 
richer significance will that expression, “ the 
blood of Jesus,” fall upon the ear of faith ! 
This, then, is he — his bleeding broken heart 
the witness to it — who came by water and by 
blood ; not by water only, but by water and 
by blood. With minds afresh impressed by 
the thought how it was that the blood of 
Christ was shed ; with hearts all full of grati- 
tude and love, let us take up 'the words that 
the Spirit has put into our lips : “ Unto him 
that loved us, and washed us from our sins in 
his own blood, to him be glory and dominion 
for ever and ever.” “ Thou art worthy, for 
thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God 
by thy blood, out of every kindred, and 
tongue, and people, and nation.” 


THE DEATH OF CHRIST. 


349 


“ Rock of ages, cleft for me, 

Let me hide myself in thee ; 

Let the water and the blood, 

From thy riven side that flowed, 

Be of sin the doable cure, 

Cleanse me from its guilt and power.” 



Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were 
both rulers of the Jews, both members of the 
Sanhedrim, — the Jewish council or court, 
composed of seventy members, in whose hands 
the supreme judicial power was lodged. It 
was the right and duty of both these men to 
have been present at the trial of our Lord on 
the morning of the crucifixion. In common 
with the other members of the Sanhedrim, 
they in all likelihood received the early sum- 
mons to assemble in the hall of Caiaphas. 
It would seem, however, that they did not 
obey the call ; that, knowing something before- 
hand of the object of the meeting, of the 
spirit and design of those who summoned it, 


THE BURIAL. 


351 


they absented themselves. We infer this 
from the fact that when, after Christ’s great 
confession, the High Priest put the question, 
u What think ye ?” to the Council, they all 
condemned him to be guilty of death. But 
we are told of Joseph, that he had not con- 
sented to the counsel and deed of those by 
whom the arrest and condemnation of Jesus 
w r ere planned and executed. In what way his 
dissent had been expressed we are not in- 
formed, but having somehow intimated it 
beforehand, it is altogether improbable that, 
without any demur on his part, he should 
have been a consenting party to the final sen- 
tence when pronounced. And neither had 
Nicodemus gone in with the course which his 
fellow-rulers had from the beginning pursued 
towards Jesus. When the officers of the 
Chief Priests and Pharisees came back to 
their employers, their task unexecuted, giving 
as their reason for not having arrested J esus, 
that u never man spake like this man,” so pro- 
voked were those Pharisees at seeing such in- 
fluence exerted by Jesus upon their own 


352 


THE BURIAL. 


menial servants, that in the passion of the 
moment, they exclaimed, “ Are ye also de- 
ceived? Have any of the rulers or of the 
Pharisees believed on him ? But this people, 
who knoweth not the law, are cursed/’ 

Perhaps the question about the rulers 
touched the conscience of Nicodemus, who 
was present on the occasion ; perhaps he felt 
that it was not so true as they imagined that 
none of the rulers believed on Jesus; per- 
haps he felt somewhat ashamed of himself 
and of the false position which he occupied. 
At any rate, the haughty and contemptuous 
tone of his brethren stirred him up for once 
to say a word : “ Doth our law,” said he to 
them, “ judge any man before it hear him, 
and know what he doeth ?” A very gentle 
and reasonable remonstrance, but one which 
had no other effect than turning against him- 
self the wrath that had been expending itself 
upon their officials. “ Art thou also,” they 
say to him, “ of Galilee ?” Nicodemus cow- 
ered under that question, and the suspicion 
that it implied. Neither then nor afterwards 


THE BURIAL. 


353 


did he say or do anything more which might 
expose him to the imputation of being a fol- 
lower of Jesus ; hut we cannot think so ill 
of him as to believe that, beyond concealing 
whatever belief in Christ he cherished, he 
would have played the hypocrite so far as to 
let his voice openly be heard as one of those 
condemning our Lord to death. 

Let us judge both these men as fairly and 
gently as we ourselves would desire to be 
judged. To what amount of enlightenment 
and belief as to the character and claims of 
Christ they had arrived previous to his de- 
cease, it were difficult to imagine. Both must 
have had a large amount of deep, inveterate 
Jewish prejudice to contend with in accepting 
the Messiahship of the Nazarene ; not such 
prejudice alone as was common to the gi'eat 
mass of their countrymen, but such as had a 
peculiar hold on the more educated men of 
their time, when raised to be guides and rulers 
of the people. Over all this prejudice Joseph 
had already triumphed ; there was a sincerity 
and integrity of judgment in him, an earnest 


354 


THE BURIAL. 


spirit of faith and hope ; he was a good man 
and a just ; one who, like the aged Simeon, 
had been waiting for the kingdom of God, the 
better prepared to hail it in whatever guise it 
came. He had thus become really, though 
not openly or professedly* a disciple of Jesus. 
We do not know whether Nicodemus had got 
so far. We do know, however, that the very 
first words and acts of Jesus at Jerusalem 
made the deepest and most favorable impres- 
sion on his mind. It was at the very opening 
of our Lord’s ministry, that this man came to 
Jesus by night. Instead of thinking of the 
covert way by which he came, only to find 
ground of censure in it, let us remember that 
he was the one and only ruler who did in any 
way come to Jesus; and that he came — as 
his very first words of salutation and inquiry 
showed — in the spirit of deep respect, and 
earnest desire for instruction. Let us remem- 
ber, too, that without one word of blame 
escaping from our Lord’s own lips, it was to 
this man that, at so early a period of his min- 
istry, our Saviour made the clear and full dis- 


THE BURIAL. 


355 


closure of the great object of his own mission 
and death, preserved in the third chapter of 
the Gospel by John; that it was to Nicode- 
mus he spake of that new spiritual birth 
by which the kingdom was to be entered ; 
that it was to Nicodemus he said, that 
as Moses had lifted up the serpent in the 
wilderness, even so must He be lifted up ; 
that it was to Nicodemus that the great 
saying was addressed, “ God so loved the 
world that he gave his only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in him should not 
perish, but have everlasting life.” Surely he 
who, up till near the close, was so chary of 
speaking about his death even to his own dis- 
ciples, would not, at the very beginning of his 
ministry, have spoken thus to this ruler of 
the Jews, had he not perceived in him one 
willing and waiting to be taught. Christ 
must have seen some good soil in that man’s 
heart, to have scattered there so much of the 
good seed. That seed was long of germinat- 
ing, but it bore fruit at last, very pleasant for 
the eye to look upon. 


356 


THE BURIAL. 


It was the fault both of Joseph and Nico- 
demus, that they hid, as it were, their faces 
from Christ ; that they were ashamed and 
afraid to confess him openly. But who shall 
tell us exactly what their state of mind, their 
faith and feeling toward him was ; how much 
of hesitation both of them may — indeed, we 
may boldly say must — have felt as to many 
things about Jesus which they could in no 
way harmonize with their conceptions of the 
Great Prophet that was to arise ? “ Search 

and look,” his brother councillors had said to 
Nicodemus, at that time when he had ven- 
tured to interpose the question which pro* 
voked them, — “ search and look ; for out of 
Galilee ariseth no prophet.” Nicodemus had 
nothing to say to that bold assertion ; nothing 
to say, we may well believe, to many an ob- 
jection taken to the pretensions of the Son of 
the Galilean carpenter. In common with Jo- 
seph, he may have believed ; but both to- 
gether may have been quietly waiting till 
some further and more distinct manifestations 
of his Messialiship were made by Christ. 


THE BURIAL. 


357 


But why did they not, so far as they did be- 
lieve in him, openly acknowledge it ? Why 
did they not feel rebuked by that poor man, 
blind from his birth, dragged for examination 
before them, who witnessed in their presence 
so good a confession ? It was because they 
knew so well that their brother rulers had 
agreed that, “ if any man did confess that he 
was Christ, he should be put out of the syna- 
gogue.” It was because they knew so well 
and felt so keenly what to them that excom- 
munication would involve : for it was no 
slight punishment among the Jews to be ex- 
pelled from the synagogue ; it involved in its 
extreme issue consequences far more disas- 
trous than a mere ban of admission into their 
religious assemblies ; it involved loss of sta- 
tion, separation from kindred and the society 
of their fellow-men. To the poor blind beg- 
gar upon whom it actually was passed, that 
doom may have fallen but lightly ; for he had 
never known much of that of which this 
doom was to deprive him. A very different 
thing this expulsion from the synagogue 


358 


THE BURIAL. 


would have been to Joseph and to Nicode- 
mus. Let us not judge these men too 
harshly for the reluctance they showed to 
brave it ; let us rather try to put ourselves 
exactly in their position, that we may sympa- 
thize with the hesitation which they felt in 
making any open acknowledgment of their 
attachment to Christ. 

His death, however, at once put an end to 
that hesitation in both their breasts. They 
may not have been present at the crucifixion. 
They would not well have known where to 
take their station, or how to comport them- 
selves there. They could not have joined in 
the mockery, nor were they prepared to ex- 
hibit themselves as friends of the Crucified. 
But though not spectators of the tragedy, 
they were somewhere in the immediate neigh- 
borhood, waiting anxiously to learn the issue. 
Could they, members of the same Sanhedrim, 
thrown often into contact, witnesses of each 
other’s bearing and conduct, as to all the steps 
which had been taken against Jesus, have 
remained ignorant of each other’s secret lean- 


THE BURIAL. 


359 


ings toward the persecuted Nazarene ? Was 
it by chance they met together at the cross, 
to act in concert there ? We would rather 
believe that, attracted by the tie of a com- 
mon sympathy with Jesus, the sad news of 
his being taken out to Golgotha to be cruci- 
fied, brought them that forenoon together ; 
that they were by each other’s side as the 
tidings reached them of all the wonders which 
had transpired around the cross, and of the 
strange death which Jesus died. The resolu- 
tion of both is promptly taken ; and it looks, 
certainly, as if taken with the knowledge of 
each other’s purpose. Joseph goes at once 
boldly to Pilate, and craves the body of Jesus. 
An ancient prophecy, of which he knew no- 
thing — one that seemed, as Jesus died, most 
unlikely of accomplishment — had proclaimed 
that he was to make his grave with the rich. 
This rich man has a new sepulchre, wherein 
never man lay, which he had bought or got 
hewn out of the rock, with the idea, perhaps, 
that he might himself be the first to occupy 
it. It lies there close at hand, not many 


360 


THE BURIAL. 


paces from the cross. He is resolved to open 
it, that it may receive, as its first tenant, the 
body of the crucified. Nay, further ; as 
there are few, if any, now of Christ’s known 
friends to undertake the task, he is resolved 
— his dignity, the sense of shame, the fear 
of the Jews, all forgotten — to put his own 
hands to the office of giving that body the 
most honorable sepulture that the time and 
circumstances can afford. 

Once assured, on the Centurion’s testimony, 
that it was even as Joseph said, Pilate at once 
gives the order that the body shall be com- 
mitted into his hands. The Centurion, bear- 
ing that order, returns to Golgotha. Joseph 
provides himself by the way with the clean 
white cloth in which to shroud the body. The 
soldiers, at their officer’s command, bear the 
bodies of the other two away, leaving that of 
Jesus still suspended on the cross. It is 
there when Joseph reaches the spot, to be 
dealt with as he likes. How quiet and how 
lonely the place, as the first preparations are 
made for the interment ! few to help, and 


THE BURIAL. 


361 


none to interrupt. The crowd has all dis- 
persed; some half dozen Galilean women 
alone remain. But is John not here ? He 
had returned to Calvary, had seen but a little 
before the thrust of the soldier’s spear; he 
knew that but a short time was left for dis- 
posing of the body. Is it at all likely that 
in such circumstances he should leave, and 
not wait to see the close ? Let us believe 
that though, with his accustomed modesty, he 
has veiled his presence, he was present stand- 
ing with those Galilean women. They see, 
coming in haste, this Joseph of Arimathea, 
whom none of them had ever known as a dis- 
ciple of their Master ; they see the white linen 
cloth that he has provided ; they notice that 
the body is committed to his charge; they 
watch with wonder as he puts forth his own 
hand to the taking down of the body. Their 
wonder grows as Nicodemus — also a stranger 
to them, whom they had never seen coming 
to Jesus — joins himself to Joseph ; not rudely 
and roughly, as the soldiers had dealt with 
the others, but gently and reverently handling 


362 


THE BURIAL. 


the dead. As they lay the body on the 
ground, it appears that this new-comer, Nico- 
demus, has brough with him a mixture of 
powdered myrrh and aloes, about one hundred 
pounds’ weight. The richest man in Jerusa- 
lem could not have furnished more or better 
spicery for the burial of his dearest friend. 
It is evident that these two men have it in 
their heart, and are ready to put to their 
hands, to treat the dead with all due respect. 
Their fears disarmed, assured of the friendly 
purpose of those interposing thus, the Gali- 
lean women gather in around the pale and life- 
less form. The white shroud is ready, the 
myrrh and the aloes are at hand, but who 
shall spread those spices on the funeral gar- 
ment, and wrap it round the corpse to fit it 
for the burial? This is a service, one of the 
last and the saddest which our poor humanity 
needs, which, as if by an instinct of nature, 
woman’s gentle hand has in all ages and in all 
countries been wont to render to the dead ; 
and though the Gospel narrative be silent here, 
we will not believe that it was otherwise at 


THE BURIAL. 


363 


the cross ; we will not believe but that it was 
the tender hands of those loving women who 
had watched at Calvary from morningtide till 
now, which offer their aid, and are permitted 
and honored to wipe from that mutilated form 
the bloody marks of dishonor which it wore, 
to swathe it with the pure linen robe, and 
wrap around the thorn-marked brow the nap- 
kin, so falsely deemed to be the last clothing 
of the dead. 

One thing alone is wanting, that the man- 
ner of the Jews in burying may be observed — 
a bier to lay the body on, to bear it to the 
sepulchre. There has been no time to get 
one, or it is felt that the distance is so short 
that it is not needed. That body has, how- 
ever, the best bier of all — the hands of true 
affection, to lift it up and carry it across to 
the new tomb which waits to receive it. The 
feet let us assign to Joseph, the body to Nico- 
demus, and that regal head with those closed 
eyes, over which the shadows of the resurrec- 
tion are already flitting, let us lay it on the 
breast of the beloved disciple. The brief 


364 


THE BURIAL. 


path from the cross to the sepulchre is soon 
traversed. In silence and in deep sorrow 
they hear their sacred burden, and lay it 
gently down upon its clean, cold, rocky bed. 
The last look of the dead is taken. The 
buriers reverently withdraw, the stone is 
rolled to the mouth of the sepulchre : — • 
separated from the living — Jesus rests with 
the dead — - 


“ At length the worst is o’er, and thou art laid 
Deep in thy darksome bed ; 

All still and cold behind yon dreary stone 
Thy sacred form is gone. 

Around those lips where peace and mercy hung 
The dew of death hath clung ; 

The dull earth o’er thee, and thy friends around, 

Thou sleep’st a silent corse, in fuueral-raiment wound.” 


The burial is over now, and we mighi de- 
part ; but let us linger a little longer, and 
bestow a parting look on the persons and the 
place, — the buriers and the burying-ground. 
The former have been few in number ; what 
they have to do, they must do quickly ; for 
the sun is far down in the western sky when 
Joseph gets the order from Pilate ; and before 


THE BURIAL. 


365 


it sets, before the great Sabbath begins, they 
must lay Jesus in the grave. Yet hurried as 
they have been, with all such honor as they 
can show, with every token of respect, have 
laid that body in the tomb ; they have done 
all they could. The last service which Jesus 
ever needed at the hands of men it has been 
their privilege to render. And for the man- 
ner in which they have rendered it, shall we 
not honor them ? Yes, verily, wherever this 
gospel of the kingdom shall be made known, 
what they thus did for the Lord’s burial shall 
be told for a memorial of them ; and hence- 
forth we shall forget of Joseph that hitherto 
he had concealed his discipleship, and acted 
as if he were a stranger to the Lord, seeing 
that, when Christ was in such a special sense 
a stranger on the earth, he opened his own 
new sepulchre to take him in ; and we shall 
forget it of Nicodemus that it was by night he 
had come to Jesus, seeing that, upon this last 
sad day he came forth so openly, with his 
costly offering of myrrh and aloes, to embalm 
Christ for the burial. Of the Galilean women 


366 


THE BURIAL. 


we have nothing to forget ; but let this be the 
token wherewith we shall remember them, 
that, the last at the cross and the first at the 
sepulchre, they were the latest at the grave : 
for Joseph has departed ; Nicodemus and the 
rest are gone ; but there, while the sun goes 
down, and the evening shadows deepen 
around, the very solitude and gloom of the 
place such as might have warned them away — • 
there are Mary Magdalene and the other Mary 
to be seen sitting over-against the sepulchre, 
unable to tear themselves from the spot, 
gazing through their tears at the place where 
the body of their Lord is laid. 

Let us now bestow a parting look upon the 
burying-ground. u In the place where he was 
crucified there was a garden, and in that gar- 
den a sepulchre.” Plant yourselves before 
that sepulchre, and look around. This is no 
place of graves ; here rise around you no 
memorials of the dead. You see but a single 
sepulchre, and that sepulchre in a garden. 
Strange mingling this of opposites, the garden 
of life and growth and beauty, circling the 


THE BURIAL. 


367 


sepulchre of death, corruption, and decay. 
Miniature of the strange world we live in. 
What garden of it has not its own grave ? 
Your path may, for a time, he through flowers 
and fragrance ; follow it far enough, it leads 
ever to a grave. But this sepulchre in this 
garden suggests other and happier thoughts. 
It was in a garden once of old — in Eden, that 
death had his first summons given, to find 
there his first prey ; it is in a garden here at 
Calvary, that the last enemy of mankind has 
the death-blow given to him — that the great 
Conqueror is in his turn overcome. Upon 
that stone which they rolled to the mouth of 
the sepulchre, let us engrave the words — • 
“ 0 death, where is thy sting ? 0 grave, 
where is thy victory ? Thanks be to God, 
which giveth us the victory, through our Lord 
Jesus Christ.” What a change it has made in 
the character and aspect of the grave, that our 
Saviour himself once lay in it! He has 
stripped it of its terrors, and to many a weary 
one given it an attractive rather than a repul- 
sive look. “I heard a voice from heaven 


368 


THE BURIAL. 


saying” — it needed a voice from heaven to 
assure us of the truth — “ Blessed are the dead 
who die in the Lord.” To such the grave is, 
indeed, a bed of blessed rest. Buried with 
Jesus, they repose till the hour of the great 
awakening cometh, when with him they shall 
arise to that newness of life over which no 
shadow of death shall ever pass. 


APPENDIX. 

It is in the hope that they may win for the 
explanation of Christ’s death presented in the 
preceding pages a larger measure of attention 
than it has yet received, that the following 
letters from eminent medical authorities are 
appended : — • 

From JAMES BEGBIE, M.D., F.R.S.E. 

Felloe, and late President, of the Royal College of Physicians of 
Edinburgh ; Physician to the- Queen in Scotland. 

My dear Dr. Hanna, — I cannot help accepting, 
as correct, the explanation which Dr. Stroud has of- 
fered — and which you have adopted, and so strikingly 
applied — of the physical cause of the death of Christ, 
namely, rupture of the heart, and consequent effusion 
of blood into the pericardium, the investing sheath 
of that organ. 

Such a lesion accounts for the phenomena recorded 
in the Scriptures regarding him, namely, the earlier 
than usual cessation of life during crucifixion, and the 


370 


APPENDIX. 


issuing of blood and water on the piercing of his side 
with the spear. 

It must be borne in mind, howevei, that rupture of 
the heart is comparatively a rare affection, and that 
the cases of it on record are, so far as I know, limited 
to those advanced in life, or to such as have been la- 
boring under some degeneration of the structure of 
the organ, a condition which rendered it liable to be 
torn when subjected to the pressure of severe physi- 
cal exertion, or the weight of mental agony. Now, 
in regard to Christ, we know that at the period of 
his death he was in the prime of life ; and that as 
morally he was “ holy, harmless, and undefiled,” so 
physically he was without spot or blemish. 

How intensely does this consideration magnify the 
sufferings he endured ! We see him in the agony in 
the Garden, and under the bloody sweat. We follow 
him to Calvary, and see him under the hiding of his 
Father’s face, bearing our sins in his own body on 
the tree. We cannot estimate the anguish of his holy 
human soul during these awful hours, when there was 
drawn from him that most touching language, “ My 
soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death but 
we can in some measure understand how his bodily 
frame, subjected to the full weight both of mental 
and bodily suffering, should yield and give way at the 
fountain of life, and how Christ, in his death, should 
thus literally fulfil the prophetic words of Old Testa- 


APPENDIX. 


371 


ment writings concerning him : “ Reproach hath 
broken my heart.” I shrink from treading farther on 
this sacred ground, and remain, dear Dr. Hanna, 
vours affectionately, 

J. BETBIEL 

10, Charlotte Square, 

Edinburgh, 26 th April, 1862. 


From J. T. SIMPSON, M.D., F.R.S.E. 

Professor of Medicine and Midwifery in the University of Edinburgh ; 
and Physician-Accoucheur to the Queen in Scotland. 

My dear Dr. Hanna, — Ever since reading, some 
ten or twelve years ago, Dr. Stroud’s remarkable trea- 
tise On the Physical Cause of the Death of Christ , 
I have been strongly impressed with the belief that 
the views which he adopted* and maintained on this 
subject are fundamentally correct. Nor has this 
opinion been in any way altered by a perusal of some 
later observations published on the same question, 
both here and on the Continent. 

That the immediate cause of the death of our blessed 
Saviour was — speaking medically — laceration or rup- 
ture of the heart, is a doctrine in regard to which 

* Dr. Stroud himself points out that Russell, Edwards, Ram- 
bach, and other writers, had more or less correctly anticipated him 
in the belief that Christ had died from rupture or breaking of the 
heart 


372 


APPENDIX. 


there can be no absolute certainty ; but, assuredly, in 
favor of it there is a very high amount of circumstan- 
tial probability. 

Let me try to state the arguments for this view in 
the form of a few brief propositions. 

I. His death was not the mere result of crucifixion ; 
for, 1st, The period was too short ; a person in the 
prime oflife, as Christ was, not dying from this mode 
of mortal punishment in six hours, as He did, but usu- 
ally surviving till the second or third day, or even 
longer. 2dly, The attendant phenomena, at the time 
of actual death were different from those of cruci- 
fixion. The crucified died, as is well known, under a 
lingering process of gradual exhaustion, weakness, 
and faintness*. On the contrary, Christ cried with a 
loud voice, and spoke once and again, — all apparently 
within a few minutes of His dissolution. 

II. No known injury, lesion, or disease of the brain, 
lungs, or other vital organs could, I believe, account 
for such a sudden termination of His sufferings in 
death, except (l.) arrestment of the action of the 
heart by fatal fainting or syncope ; or (2.) rupture 
of the walls of the heart or larger blood-vessels is- 
suing from it. 

III. The attendant symptoms — particularly the loud 
cry and subsequent exclamations — show that death 
was not the effect of mortal fainting, or mere fatal 
arrestment of the action of the heart by syncope. 


APPENDIX. 


373 


IV. On the other hand, these symptoms were such 
as have been seen in cases of rupture of the avails 
of the heart. Thus, in the latest book published in 
the English language on Diseases of the Heart, the 
eminent author, Dr. Walshe, Professor of Medicine 
in University College, London, when treating of the 
symptoms indicating death by rupture of the heart, 
observes, “ The hand is suddenly carried to the front 
of the chest, a piercing shriek uttered,” etc. etc. The 
rapidity of the resulting death is regulated by the 
size and shape of the ruptured opening. But usually 
death very speedily ensues in consequence of the blood 
escaping from the interior of the heart into the cavity 
of the large surrounding heart-sac or pericardium ; 
which sac has, in cases of rupture of the heart, been 
found on dissection to contain sometimes two, three, 
four, or more pounds of blood accumulated within 
it, and separated into red clot and limpid serum, or 
“ blood and water,” — as is seen in blood when col- 
lected out of the body in a cup or basin in the opera- 
tion of common blood-letting. 

V. No medical jurist would in a court of law, ven- 
ture to assert, from the mere symptoms preceding 
death, that a person had certainly died of rupture of 
the heart. To obtain positive proof that rupture of 
the heart was the cause of death, a post-mortem exa- 
mination of the chest would be necessary. In ancient 
times, such dissections were not practised. But the 


874 


APPENDIX. 


details left regarding Christ’s death are most strik« 
ingly peculiar in this respect, that they offer us the 
result of a very rude dissection, as it were, by the 
gash* made in His side after death by the thrust of 
the Roman soldier’s spear. The effect of that wound- 
ing or piercing of the side was an escape of “ blood 
and water,” visible to the Apostle John standing 
some distance off ; and I do not believe that anything 
could possibly account for this appearance, as de- 
scribed by that Apostle, except a collection of blood 
effused into the distended sac of the pericardium in 
consequence of rupture of the heart, and afterwards 
separated, as is usual with extravasatecl blood, into 
those two parts, viz. (1.) crassamentum or red clot, 
and (2.) watery serum. The subsequent puncture 
from below of the distended pericardial sac would 
most certainly, under such circumstances, lead to the 
immediate ejection and escape of its sanguineous con- 
tents in the form of red clots of blood and a stream 
of watery serum, exactly corresponding to that de- 
scription given in the sacred narrative, “ and forth- 
with came there out blood and water,” — an appear- 
ance which no other natural event or mode of death 
can explain or account for. 

VI. Mental emotions and passions are well known 
by all to affect the actions ot the heart in the way of 

* Its size may be inferred from the Apostle Thomas being asked 
to thrust not his “finger,” but his “hand” into it. — John xx. 


APPENDIX. 


375 


palpitation, fainting, etc. That these emotions and 
passions, when in overwhelming excess, occasionally 
though rarely, produce laceratio’n or rupture of the 
walls of the heart, is stated by most medical authori- 
ties who have written on the affections of this organ ; 
and our poets even allude to this effect as an esta- 
blished fact, — 

“ The grief that does not speak 
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.” 

But if ever a human heart was riven and ruptured 
by the mere amount of mental agony that was en- 
dured, it would surely — we might even argue a 
priori — be that of our Redeemer, when, during these 
dark and dreadful hours on the cross, He, “being 
made a curse for us,” “ bore our griefs and carried 
our sorrows,” and suffered for sin, the malediction of 
God and man, “full of anguish,” and now “exceed- 
ing sorrowful even unto death.” 

There are theological as well as medical arguments 
in favor of the opinion that Christ in reality died 
from a ruptured or broken heart. You know them 
infinitely better than I do. But let me merely 
observe that 

VII. If the various wondrous prophecies and 
minute predictions in Psalms xxii. and Ixix., regard- 
ing the circumstances connected with Christ’s death 
be justly held as literally true, such as, “They 
pierced my hands and my feet,” “ They part my gar- 


376 


APPENDIX. 


merits among them, and cast lots upon my vesture,” 
etc., why should we regard as merely metaphorical, 
and not as literally true also, the declarations in the 
same Psalms, “Reproach hath broken my heart,” 
“ My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of 
my bowels?” And 

VIII. Death by mere crucifixion was not a form ol 
death in which there was much, if indeed any, shed- 
ding of blood. Punctured wounds do not generally 
bleed; and the nails, besides being driven through 
parts that were not provided with large blood- 
vessels, necessarily remained plugging up the open- 
ings made by their passage. The whole language 
and types of Scripture, however, involve the idea 
that the atonement for our sins was obtained by the 
blood of Christ shed for us during his death on the 
cross. “Without shedding of blood there is no 
remission.” This shedding, however, was assuredly 
done in the fullest possible sense, under the view that 
the immediate cause of his dissolution was rupture of 
the heart, and the consequent fatal escape of His 
heart- and life-blood from the central cistern of the 
circulation. 

It has always appeared — to my medical mind at 
least — that this view of the mode by which death 
was produced in the human body of Christ, intensi- 
fies all our thoughts and ideas regarding the immen- 
sity of the astounding sacrifice which He made for 


APPENDIX. 


377 


our sinful race upon the cross. Nothing can possibly 
he more striking and startling than the appalling and 
terrible passiveness with which God as man sub- 
mitted, for our sakes, His incarnate body to all the 
horrors and tortures of the crucifixion. But our 
wonderment at the stupendous sacrifice only increases 
when we reflect that, while thus enduring for our sins 
the most cruel and agonizing form of corporeal death, 
He was ultimately “ slain,” not by the effects of the 
anguish of his corporeal frame, but by the effects of 
the mightier anguish of His mind ; the fleshy walls 
of His heart — like the veil, as it were, in the temple 
of His human body — becoming rent and riven, as for 
us “ He poured out his soul unto death — “ the tra- 
vail of His soul ” in that awful hour thus standing 
out as unspeakably bitterer and more dreadful than 
even the travail of his body. 

Believe me, my dear Dr. Hanna, ever sincerely 
yours, 

J. T. SIMPSON, M.D. 

62 Queen Street, Edinburgh, 

May 1, 1862. 


From JOHN STRUTHERS, M.D., F.R.O.S. 

Lecturer on Anatomy, Surgeons’ HalL 

Dear Dr. Hanna, — I do not think that any intel- 
ligent medical man will read Dr. Stroud’s treatise 


378 


APPENDIX. 


On the Physical Cause of the Death of Christ , 
without being satisfied with the explanation. No 
other hypothesis will satisfactorily explain the sepa- 
rate escape of blood and water from a wound in that 
region, and all the incidents attending the death of 
Christ are entirely accounted for by the hypothesis 
of rupture of the heart, and the separation of the 
watery and the red constituents of the blood within 
the distended pericardium, on the puncture of which 
they would escape forcibly. The various cases of 
rupture of the heart from mental emotion, with simi- 
lar separation of the watery and the red parts of the 
blood, collected by Dr. Stroud, and also his cases of 
bloody sweat, form a body of extremely interesting 
illustration and proof, and altogether the treatise is a 
monument of careful research and cautious reasoning. 
To medical men it has a special additional value as 
accoimting for incidents which force themselves upon 
the medical mind for explanation. Those of my 
brethren who have not read Dr. Stroud’s book, must 
be much puzzled, as I was before I had read it, to 
account for the escape of water after, and distinct 
from, blood, from a wound in that part of the body — 
supposing the words “blood and water” to be 
accepted literally, which there need be no hesitation 
now in doing. Of course, the rupture of the heart is 
in every aspect the great point of interest, the escape 
of the blood and water being of importance only as 


APPENDIX. 


379 


an incident which, having been seen, requires expla- 
nation, and as further hearing on the previous rup- 
ture of the heart. 

To all, Dr. Stroud’s treatise must he interesting, 
not as raising or gratifying curiosity, hut as an intel- 
ligent explanation of the incidents themselves, and, 
still more, as a new illustration of the awful agony 
which our Redeemer must have suffered. I was in- 
debted to you for first bringing Dr. Stroud’s book 
under my notice, and I have since repeatedly recom- 
mended it to the notice of my medical friends and 
students. I find lately that the first edition is now 
exhausted, and hope that it will not he long before a 
new edition of so valuable a work makes its appear- 
ance. 

Believe me, with much respect, yours very sincerely, 

JOHN STRUTHERS. 

3 Park Placer Edinbubgh, 

May 1, 1S62. 



i 













* # 

'■ V*v*- 

, ' ” • k A A ONO- - 4 ° V , B 

,r ° o° ^ 

* o 0 X * 

r V v ^ " 



O * 



f ; ^ > f «v> 

..^ ° x° °<*> >• ^ 

s > C 

>* . 0 ° °o 

^ » ' * 0 , •% 

^ ^ t <? * "V> 

; « 

^ = 

-b C, V 

\ *v 

1 « * S s <* y 0 » X 

% °o % 4 

* ^ ^ * 



^ 9 


if * , «■ - ,, ' 

> <H -r*, a- y => 

* tP **- ' V v , > 

f .***' _ ^ ^ , 0 ° 





«p 


,^ v ^ -. I 

A ^ *777*'' ^ v , , <^ <y o.x^ 

O (V * L 8 « <6 

^ C> a V yr?7^ 1 S 

*© o v * JifS^ “ ^ v 

* 




* .o° c o, *•»,,,.' # V % , '"i’ .o'- 
, 0 V »’<*», ^ v'V"'* "> .o ' 1 »'*«, 

i <- « s, -. ^ - . vWitefc,'. a A -4 '• •’*■* 




* A ^ \ I ft 

* «■ v 1 1 * 




*/> 

^ <v V ^ 

* ^> 0 X 

* 4 ^ * 

v v* ^ 

^ y % '- 

>V • • ^ ' ”* °.o* . 


. « » * * ^ > 
y 0 * X * \'^ O, * ./ s s 

t 0 N C * ^ ** S 

♦ ^T<\rv ^ O 
A 

yT tV V 

« o or 
* 


* ( 
*> a 0 


o if „ ^ 

^ * 0 ,. ^ v ' s ^ r - 



N .'sS ” 7 ct' ^ 

i 0 o c b”y-’^ avJ l* o 

0 ^ » ’ *•, ^ ' 1 1 V V s' ” ” 3 " ° y v’ *» 

+ .V ^ V, .V 


A 


A v ^ 1 (y 

^ 55 



